Kendrick Perkins ‘still cool’ with his entire ‘NBA family,’ except Kevin Durant

Kendrick Perkins has taken shots at both Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. It seems that may have cost him a friend.

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Based on the comments he’s made about Kyrie Irving over the past year alone, Kendrick Perkins had no problem jeopardizing whatever relationship he had with his old Cleveland Cavaliers teammate.

It appears Perkins’ approach to his job as an NBA analyst may have also cost him his friendship with Kevin Durant. The big man says the two ex-Oklahoma City Thunder teammates no longer have a relationship.

“I’m still cool with all my friends, everybody from the NBA family I still could call, I still go to dinner with, I still hang with, we still good people. They know I got a job to do. Except for one person. That’s Kevin Durant.” Perkins said to Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated. “So guess what? That tells me that I’m doing my job well and I’m staying loyal to my brotherhood. Especially the people that I know. Only sensitive guys get mad because you got to talk about them in the media.”

Perkins also didn’t help himself when he called Durant’s decision to sign with the Golden State Warriors “the weakest move in NBA history.”

“It wasn’t nothing personal I was going at KD about,” Perkins said. “For him to try to come at me on Twitter, basically saying that I shouldn’t be able to talk basketball because I averaged two points, three rebounds. He knows what I brought to that Oklahoma City team. I’m not about to get all the way back and forth with it, but don’t act like I was just out there passing the ball either.”

And when Durant called Perkins a sellout, the center “wanted to go for his neck.” But, as Mannix writes, he couldn’t:

[Perkins] hopped on a Zoom with his people. They reminded him of the date: June 19 — Juneteenth — the date commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. Perkins cooled off. He went on TV the next day. He reminded Durant of Durant’s relationship with his kids. With his wife. Of Mother’s Day, 2011, when Durant and Perkins shared an emotional night on the road. He wiped away tears. It was perceived as sadness. It wasn’t.

“You don’t know how much it burned me up not to say what I wanted to say,” Perkins told Mannix. “I had to take the high road. People thought I was getting teary-eyed because of our relationship. It wasn’t that at all. With everything going on in America, I had to hold back. But after I got through it, I was glad I did.”