Kevin Durant is the sports social media MVP of the decade

What a decade it’s been for KD on Twitter and Instagram.

The 2010s, for better or for worse, became the decade social media went completely mainstream.

For sports fans, that meant so much more access to the athletes they love, which again, was for better or for worse.

There were gleeful trolls like Joel Embiid. There was LeBron James, king of the subtweet and Taco Tuesdays, who knew the power of social media to both deliver messages and delight the masses. We delighted when athletes did trending challenges like the rest of us and were in awe when they used their clout to raise money for causes and stood up for social justice.

But not many of them are Kevin Durant. And KD deserves our Best of the Decade hardware.

Let’s start with the fact that we’ve written about the Brooklyn Nets’ star’s Twitter and Instagram exploits countless times, and I think it’s because he acts like any other person does on the social media platform. He’s more than happy to log in late at night and respond to trolls, haters, television talking heads and die-hard fans. No egg avatar is too small, no blue check mark is too big to cast aside with a brutal response or the perfect comeback. Some critics might wonder why he wastes his time, but I think he gets a kick out of it. And he should!

It doesn’t make him petty. It makes him human.

That’s exactly why he created burner accounts, a “controversy” in scare quotes only simply because it made headlines and led to a lot of roasting from fans and fellow NBA stars (including Embiid!). But when ESPN’s Jay Williams asked him in March of this year about the saga, he had this to say:

“I wasn’t used to that amount of attention, you know, from playing basketball. I wanted a place where I can talk to my friends without anybody just butting in my conversations or mixing my words or taking everything out of context because I enjoyed that place.

“… I had an Instagram account that I just use for my friends and family. Like, it’s a cool place for me just to be me instead of worrying about Bleacher Report or Barstool mixing up anything I want to say.”

At the time, he called himself “a total (expletive) idiot” and was so mad at himself for going too deep with his use of burners to pose as someone else that he lost sleep over it. Again: doesn’t that seem human to you, especially for a person so famous who longed to be normal for a few hours on social media? Here, he owned the mistake and moved on. You have to respect that.

So as we enter 2020, remember: troll or insult him and other athletes at your own peril. They’re watching, just like you are.

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