Kevin Durant played the Golden State Warriors this week for the first time since his former team won a title without him.
“I can’t lie: Watching the Finals, I knew so many people would turn their focus on me once they won. I was like, I hate that they won, because y’all not going to make it about them; it’s going to be all about me,” Durant told Michael Lee of the Washington Post. “I think it’s just a childish way of looking at that experience. I feel like you can take it all in and appreciate what they did and not even talk about me. I was just sitting at home. But I get how it is.”
There was reported speculation that Golden State’s title contributed to his trade request from the Nets this past offseason.
“That’s my family over there,” he says. “I can be a Brooklyn Net and y’all can be the Golden State Warriors, and it’ll still be love. … When they succeed, I succeed, because I’m a part of that history forever.”
From 2011 until 2019, Durant’s teams finished no worse than the Conference Finals in all but one season he was able to finish. In his first two healthy seasons with the Nets, Durant has won one playoff series. But Durant doesn’t regret his decision to leave the Warriors for Brooklyn.
“It was another pivot,” Durant said of leaving Golden State. “I just wanted to play ball somewhere else. But a lot of people see it as I’m chasing something. And I think it probably stems when I said, ‘I don’t want to be number two no more.’ I was number two in high school, in the draft. But what I had to explain to people was, I had just lost in the Finals. I wanted to go back and win the Finals. It wasn’t about: ‘I want to be the best ever. I want to be better than LeBron or [Michael Jordan].’ I don’t give a s— about that. I want to wake up every day and do what I do. If we win, I know that stuff comes with me being the best that I can be.”
