The blow-up between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green during Durant’s final season with the Warriors seems to be a perfect line of demarcation for that era of Warriors’ basketball.
That seemed to be the moment that truly pushed Durant out of Golden State and had him ready to move on. It’s not the only reason, as Durant has made clear before, but it was definitely one of the reasons.
Apparently, though, it wasn’t only because of what Green said. The bigger issue was the way the Warriors handled it, Durant told Green on his show “Chips.”
The Warriors ended up suspending Green for a game after he refused to apologize to Durant after the incident. But that wasn’t the issue.
The issue was, Durant said, that no one seemed to want to actually address the situation at hand.
Warning: There is some NSFW language in this video.
Durant said he thought that was a “big situation” for the team and it was the first instance where they’d gone through some inner turmoil. And they needed to handle it within the locker room.
He compared it to the instance where Scottie Pippen refused to check in for the Bulls’ final play in Game 7 against the Knicks in 1994 because it wasn’t a play where he got the last shot.
Durant recalled how players in the locker room called Pippen out for that. He said that’s what needed to happen with the Warriors in that moment.
“We needed that. We just needed to throw all of that [expletive] out on the table and be like ‘Yo, Dray, K, like, that was [expletive] up that we even had to go through that. Let’s just wipe our hands of that and go finish the task.’ I don’t think we did that. We tried to dance around it…It just made [expletive] weird to me.”
Long story short, Draymond Green said, the Warriors’ front office “[expletive]ed it up.” Durant agreed. “I think so, too.”
Hindsight is always 20/20. But even at that moment, anyone could tell the situation could’ve been handled a lot better by the Warriors. They suspended Green for not apologizing while Durant faced no repercussions and it just didn’t seem fair at the time.
It rubbed people the wrong way including Durant himself, apparently. And it’s part of the reason why he’s in Brooklyn now, it seems.
The Warriors won two titles in the Durant era and they probably would’ve won 3 if they’d remained healthy against the Raptors. But what’s a shame is, maybe if they’d handled this situation better, they could’ve won even more.
We’ll never know.
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