LeBron James and Kevin Durant
Will Kevin Durant go to the Los Angeles Lakers?
After an interview with Bleacher Report’s Rich Bucher in the fall, KD labeled playing with LeBron James as toxic and admitted that the attention LeBron James receives isn’t his fault.
So much hype comes from being around LeBron from other people,” Durant told Bucher.
“He has so many fanboys in the media. Even the beat writers just fawn over him. I’m like, we’re playing basketball here, and it’s not even about basketball at certain points. So I get why anyone wouldn’t want to be in that environment because it’s toxic. Especially when the attention is bullshit attention, fluff. It’s not LeBron’s fault at all; it’s just the fact you have so many groupies in the media that love to hang on every word. Just get out of the way and let us play basketball.”
Appearing on the Scoop B Radio Podcast, Bucher told me that the first thing he thought when Durant told him that was: “He’s not going to LA.”
Check out a snippet from our Scoop B Radio Q & A below:
Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson: Scoop B Radio, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Play Scoop B Radio.com on the line with Ric Bucher. You talked about the Warriors, you said that you didn’t believe Klay was going anywhere, Curry isn’t going anywhere, you wrote a piece, I discussed it with Kevin Durant. I want to give it its full credence because people can take and run with it. I think that your article was a case study in aggregation. The toxic environment comment. Kevin Durant said “So much hype comes from being around LeBron from other people. He has so many fanboys in the NBA, even the beat writers just calling over him. I’m like, we’re playing basketball here and it’s not even about basketball at certain points. So I get why anyone wouldn’t want to be in that environment because it’s toxic, especially when the attention is bullshit attention, fluff. It’s not Lebron’s fault at all, it’s just the fact that you have so many groupies in the media that love to hang on every word. Just get out of the way and let us play basketball.” My question to you is: when Kevin Durant said that, your first instinct or thought was…
Ric Bucher: He’s not going to LA, that was my first thought. Also, I thought, ‘you know what? There’s a very good chance that people are going to jump on these quotes and they’re going to ignore the line, “it’s not LeBron’s fault at all”. Maybe the third thought was that KD, for all that is around LeBron, that he really would like, “can we just measure us? Would you just measure us as basketball players right now?” Because I think it’s hard, a part of KD feels ‘if we were measured just as basketball players right now, I would be on top, or maybe not on top, but that’s how I’d like it to be. Like, let’s not get to all of the extraneous stuff in terms of social issues and, you know, the latest that the president is doing, and not that he does it, that he agrees with any of LeBron’s stances, or that he doesn’t have opinions himself when it comes to causes, but that everything around LeBron becomes inflated and I tend to agree with it. I don’t need LeBron’s opinion on everything that happens under the sun, it’s not necessarily of value to me, and yet, I also know that whatever LeBron has to say is going to generate clicks, is going to generate interest, and so the media, to a certain respect, is trying to cater to the audience that wants that. I just, in covering the league, I get that a lot. I find myself rolling my eyes at times with the questions that are asked of LeBron, like he’s Andrew Young, like he’s some former political figure, ambassador, I mean, he’s done a tremendous amount, but I don’t know what the the value is to ask him about something that he isn’t necessarily well-versed on the history of just because he’s LeBron James. That, to me, seems to be like you’re just exploiting him, and you’re exploiting the attention that he garners.
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