How close was Kevin Durant to being traded to the Warriors?
Not close at all.
With that being said, it wasn’t because Steph Curry vetoed it. In fact, according to Rolling Stone, Curry was all for Kevin Durant coming back to the Bay so they could win more titles.
In one of five interviews, Curry revealed that he and the Warriors legitimately discussed whether and how to blow up the roster of the defending NBA champions this summer for a reunion with Durant, who dramatically split from Golden State in 2019 for the Brooklyn Nets following back-to-back titles.
Durant reconciled with the Nets late last month, after reportedly requesting a trade and demanding that his team’s owner fire the head coach and general manager. But Curry says his fellow future Hall of Famer is “misunderstood” — and that he would have welcomed back Durant with open arms.
As Curry told Rolling Stone on Aug. 9, three days after Durant’s reported ultimatum to the Nets’ ownership: “There was a conversation internally amongst us about ‘If he was available, would you?’ Every team has those conversations, and obviously in our situation, they’re gonna call me and ask me, ‘How do you feel about it?’
“I was never hesitant. The idea of playing with KD and knowing who he is as a person, from our history in those three years, I think KD’s a really good dude. I think he is misunderstood. I think he has had certain things happen in his life that hurt his ability to trust people around him, in a sense of making him feel safe at all times. So all of those things, I understand, having played with him and gotten to know him. I love that dude.
“And if you said, ‘Oh, KD’s coming back, and we’re gonna play with him,’ I had so much fun playing with him those three years, I’d be like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ Then you have to think: What does that actually mean? What does it look like? You tell me I’m playing with [current Warriors teammates Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Poole, and Draymond Green], I’m like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ There’s all types of emotion and things that happen to the league. And if anybody’s saying that you wouldn’t entertain that conversation — no disrespect to anybody on our team — but you don’t know how things work. But you also understand, like, if we run this thing back, I’ve got complete confidence in my team that we can win it again, as constructed.
Kevin Durant will head back into battle with Kyrie Irving and not Steph Curry.
Flip the page for video on how the potential trade might have looked.
