There are two topics of conversation that are guaranteed to fire any NBA fan up. The first is settling the GOAT debate between Michael Jordan and LeBron James, and the second is Kevin Durant joining the Warriors in 2016. That move turned the league on its head and inspired a million thinkpieces and unhinged rants, and nearly a decade later, people still can’t just let it go.
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We all know the story by now. Durant and his OKC Thunder had just been beaten by the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference Finals, giving up a 3-1 lead in doing so. The Warriors then turned around and blew a 3-1 lead of their own, ruining their record-setting 73-9 season and greasing the wheels for the most shocking free agent decision of all time.
Durant won two rings and two Finals MVPs with the Warriors before eventually moving on to the Brooklyn Nets to join forces with Kyrie Irving and James Harden, and he’s bounced around ever since — first to the Suns, where things couldn’t have ended much worse, and now to the Rockets.
Things are going well in Houston, and at 16-7 the Rockets look like one of the few teams with the firepower to hang with, ironically, Durant’s old team in Oklahoma City. No matter what KD does, though, it looks like he’ll never be able to outrun the stigma of what he did when he left OKC for Golden State.
In a recent interview with Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson, Byron Scott spoke about player movement in the NBA, and he called KD out specifically, not just for joining the Warriors back in the day, but for joining the Rockets this offseason.
“I’m a big Kevin Durant fan. I really am,” he said. “But when you’re one of the best players in this league, you don’t start chasing rings. You don’t start joining other teams to try to get that exclusive ring that you haven’t gotten in a few years.”
Scott lumped LeBron James into that conversation, as well. Like Durant, LeBron hasn’t been tethered to one place as he left Cleveland for Miami, then went back and delivered a championship, only to eventually leave again for L.A. He contrasted those two with Steph Curry, who has been the rare modern superstar to spend his entire career in one place.
“That’s why I love Steph so much. Steph has stayed in Golden State no matter what,” he said. “The good times and the bad times.I’m not faulting LeBron or KD or anyone else. You do what you wanna do with your life, but as a basketball enthusiast and a purist I would love for guys like a Steph to stay right where he is and say, Look. I’ma win here or I’ma lose here. One way or the other, it’s gonna be the same.”
At the end of the day, that approach has worked for Steph, as he’s won four rings with the same team. Durant has two, both when he was on the Warriors, and LeBron has four, though he spread them out with two in Miami, one in Cleveland, and one with the Lakers.
Scott comes from a different generation, a time when players didn’t have nearly the power they have today to move around so much. Most of the guys from that time feel the same way he does, though at least he was respectful enough in this interview to make it clear that he still thinks highly of KD and LeBron.
Others have made silly assertions like KD’s rings don’t count, or LeBron’s Lakers title deserves an asterisk because it happened in the bubble. We just have to accept that this is a topic that basketball fans get big mad over. Would it be nice if everybody stayed put and tried to make it work with the team they were drafted to? Maybe, but that’s how you end up in an unhappy marriage.
Durant and LeBron have built up enough cachet in their careers to call their own shots, and as time has gone on, their way of doing things has become the norm. Like it or not, there’s no denying their greatness, even if they’ve gotten it done in a different way than someone like Steph or the players from Scott’s generation.
