When Kevin Durant chose Brooklyn as his new home in the summer of 2019, he shocked the basketball world. The superstar had a chance to play for the New York Knicks, the bigger basketball brand in the Big Apple, but he chose the Nets instead.
Durant has previously expressed he thought about the Knicks, briefly, when considering his next destination as his deal with the Golden State Warriors came to an end. But despite all the rumors that circulated before he joined the Nets, not once did Durant ever seriously considered signing with the Knicks.
“I never planned on going to the Knicks,” Durant told JJ Redick on the New Orleans Pelicans shooting guard’s podcast, The Old Man & the Three. “Once I signed a 1+1 (with Golden State) the noise got louder around me just going to the Knicks for some reason. [The] Knicks need a savior, you know how that goes. Every time a big free agent is up the Knicks are going to get him. So, it just took off.”
Durant felt the media tried to dig in more on the Knicks idea when he and Draymond Green went through their rough patch in 2018-19:
Once the media infiltrated our locker room with that Draymond situation, they ran with the rumors even more. It just got so loud every single day. … I think the media just hyped it up and wanted to just create drama around our team so much and around me that they made up this Knicks thing.
So, around February, as I was thinking, I didn’t want to be the savior of the Knicks or NY. I didn’t care about being the King of New York. That didn’t really move me. I didn’t care about being on Broadway, like that [expletive].
Ultimately, there was never any Knicks vs. Nets debate going through Durant’s head. There was one place that fit his needs above the rest:
Brooklyn was everything that I’m about: chill, on the low, all black, we quiet, just focus on basketball. There’s no show when you come to our games. There’s no Madison Square Mecca, all of that [expletive]. We just going to hoop and build something new over in Brooklyn.
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