Getty Stephen Curry #30 and Kevin Durant #35 of the Golden State Warriors sit on the bench in the first half against the Washington Wizards
The relationship between Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors has been duly noted. After joining the franchise in 2016 and winning back-to-back NBA titles and NBA Finals MVP awards, Durant departed from the Golden State in 2019. Much has been made of Durant’s exit since joining the Brooklyn Nets that July. The spat with Draymond Green earlier that season, the ruptured Achilles Tendon in the NBA Finals, and all the unreported drama that never hit the newsrooms.
Durant’s looming free agency seemed like a dark cloud that hung over the Golden State locker room the entire season. But in a recent interview on the “Real Ones” podcast, Warriors’ star Stephen Curry said he never had any sour feelings about Durant’s departure.
“I never really had any hurt, to begin with. I knew as a man, as an athlete, he didn’t owe me anything, he doesn’t owe our franchise anything. It was a situation where he left, it was his own decision,” Curry said.
“I made sure I was open and available about how I felt about him as a person, and as a player, and how confident I was we would be able to win for a long time. I fully respect him as a person and had so much appreciation for what we were able to accomplish. I didn’t really have any resentment on that front.”
Stephen Curry Gets Candid on Post-Durant Warriors
Though Durant and Curry were one of the most dominant pairings in NBA history, the two future Hall of Famers have spent most of their careers as rivals on the court. And after Curry and the Warriors won their first NBA title without Durant in 2022, the venom between their two fanbases heightened even more.
But even after winning the first Finals MVP of his career, Curry says that he is not in personal competition with Durant. His focus is on reaching the highest possible level of team success with the Warriors.
“In terms of the last four years, since we’ve played, there’s competition, the different narratives that come up in terms of the success we’ve had, him trying to find another championship. You do not really get to play into it as much,” Curry added.
“Because you have your own things to worry about in the sense of leading your own team and making sure you’re giving everything you’ve got, and not getting distracted with all the bulls-it that goes around our league in terms of narratives that pop up.”
Kevin Durant Clears Air With Draymond Green
The consensus around the NBA community was that Durant left the Warriors to join the Nets mainly because he was mad at Draymond and what he said during their infamous nationally televised argument. But according to Durant, he was more upset about the way that the situation was handled by Warriors’ brass than he was about what was actually said to him.
“It wasn’t the argument,” Durant said to Green during an appearance on “Chips.” “It was the way that everybody — Steve Kerr acted like it did not happen. Bob Myers tried to just discipline you and think that that would put the mask over everything. I really felt like that was such a big situation for us as a group, the first time we went through something like that. We had to get that s—t all out.”
For the Warriors and Durant, 2019 has become a year of what-ifs. So many determining factors that changed the course of history. We may never have the answers. But what cannot be disputed is that while Durant was on the Warriors, they were one of the most unstoppable forces in the history of the NBA.