Not all rivalries are settled on the court. For years, Kendrick Perkins has grown his presence on ESPN by making wildly outlandish takes that make even the most unplugged NBA fan scratch their head. Perk did this again last month when he referred to himself as the leader of the Thunder during the historic Kevin Durant-Russell Westbrook-James Harden era.
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“It wasn’t KD, it wasn’t Russ, it wasn’t James, I was the one leading,” Perk claimed online. Many just rolled their eyes.
But for Perk to say something so utterly ridiculous didn’t sit right with Durant. The 15-time All-Star instead took to X and wrote, “I know this may be a reach, but this comment is by far the craziest s–t I’ve seen this week.”
It’s not that Perkins didn’t have a strong relationship with his teammates during that time. It’s that he was far from the glue that he claimed to be in the locker room. Perk averaged 4.2 PPG in that Thunder Era. Durant and Westbrook? A significant amount more.
A few days later, Perk doubled down on his comments. “When I arrived, I saw separation. I come from a contending team with the Celtics, where everybody was united. I get there, they had three separate groups,” he boldly said. He later added that Nick Collision joined him as the team’s leader.
His shouts, although loud and abrupt, seem to have faded in the distance. Funnily enough, this isn’t even the first time that Kendrick Perkins and Kevin Durant have gone at it, particularly on social media.
In January 2020, big Perk tweeted a tease for his appearance on SportsCenter, where he planned to make a case for Russell Westbrook being the greatest Thunder player of all time.
Fans quickly disputed this opinion, insinuating that Durant was the best to ever don a Thunder uniform. “Hey, Kevin left the door open, and Russ walked right in,” responded Perk. “KD lost in the second round without Russ when I was there. So what that mean?”
KD, like a lion ready to pounce, joined in on this fun little thread by burying Perkins in his own mediocrity. “Yea and our starting center @KendrickPerkins averaged a whopping 2 and 3 during that series. U played hard tho champ lol,” he tweeted back, directly in the replies of Perkins’ original post.
A troll then emerged, poking at Durant for “taking the easy” route toward securing two championship rings. This echoed what Perk said days earlier about KD, calling his jump to the Warriors the “weakest move in NBA history.”
But KD wasn’t about to let that foolishness go untouched. “Haha Nah perk just been shooting his lil shots at me for a minute,” he wrote back. Clearly, there was no love lost between the two former teammates.
He then told Perk that he should have “worked on his skills.” The media covered the Twitter tirade as if it were the end of the world. It was instantly forgotten about a few months later when the NBA shutdown signified the beginning of the COVID-19 restrictions.
Yet here we are in 2025, and not much has changed. Kendrick Perkins continues to spew off-the-wall ridiculousness while KD, now 36, still proves that he can ball with the best of them, including by laying into the haters online.
This isn’t the only feud the two former champions have had in their careers, but it seems to have far outlasted their short tenure as teammates.
