Draymond Green sounds off on Kevin Durant for being ‘elephant in room’

There was tension in Golden State during Kevin Durant’s last year with the Warriors. Draymond Green said it was all on the now Nets forward.

The tension between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green during the former’s last season with the Golden State Warriors was apparent. The reason why seemed pretty clear, as well — the team didn’t know if Durant was sticking around.

Now a member of the Brooklyn Nets, Durant clearly didn’t stay with the Warriors.

After Durant signed with the Nets, Green expressed he didn’t find out about his ex-teammates plans to leave. Nor did he mind that, stating to ESPN:

He didn’t owe it to me to tell me before he told everybody else. We did what we had to do. The thing that people forget about in this league is like, this is our lives.

But it appears Green did have an issue with the way Durant left all his Warriors in the dark over the course of the 2018-19 season. The forward laid into Durant on Uninterrupted, while discussing 1997-98 Chicago Bulls’ contract situations, which were highlighted in the latest episode of ESPN’s ‘The Last Dance”:

Our situation was a little bit different. From the standpoint of it was contracts on players. It wasn’t necessarily the organization. For instance, Kevin took the one year deal on his own, so that was kind of the elephant in the room.

And although Steve’s [Kerr] approach was like ‘Hey guys, let’s enjoy this year because we don’t know what next year brings,’ you got, Kevin’s contract, you got Klay’s [Thompson] contract. And I kind of got thrown in that contract thing although I had another year after that year, which was this year. And so that was kind of the elephant in the room. And although Steve would kind of hit on it of like, ‘let’s just enjoy this year for what it is because we don’t know what the next year holds’ — it didn’t carry necessarily the same weight.

Because what should have happened was Kevin come out and say ‘Hey man, like this is it like so, let’s do this’ or, ‘this isn’t it.’ You know what I’m saying? But you can’t just leave the elephant in the room. Because what happened was, the question came to us every day. Every time we spoke to the media, Klay and myself was asked about our contract, and it was strictly due to Kevin. Because while that was going on, Klay was saying, ‘I want to be a Warrior forever. Like, I want to be here we started this thing. This is where I want to be.’ I’m saying, ‘I want to be here for my career, we started this, we built this — I want to finish my career here with the guys I started it with.’ And then you kinda had Kevin, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do next year,’ and it don’t matter, but it does matter because you’re not the only person that has to answer that question.

Once the subject of the media came up, Green seemed to get particularly frustrated.

And to be quite frank with you, you’re honestly the last person that has to answer the question because you don’t really say [expletive]. Like, you don’t say much to the media. If anything, you tell them to shut the [expletive] up. Well, I don’t tell them to shut the [expletive] up. I kinda have a conversation, so I’m stuck answering that question all the time.

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