On Saturday night, Kevin Durant will return to Chesapeake Energy Arena for the first time since he infamously left the Oklahoma City Thunder in free agency in favor of joining Stephen Curry & co. in Golden State. Durant is the greatest player to ever suit up for Oklahoma City, but he isn’t expecting a warm welcome in his return, he tells ESPN’s Marc Stein:
“I know what’s important [to Thunder fans] and their team is way more important than just one player. … I’m not going in there acting like I’m going to be praised, I know how it’s going to be.”
“I know they’re going to be rowdy in there, man,” Durant told Stein. “I’ve been a part of some of the loudest nights in that arena. So I know it’s not going to be the friendliest welcome, but, like I said, I can’t wait to see the people that I really built relationships with over my time there and, you know, I’m sure fans that I got to know throughout my time playing there, even though they might not cheer for me out loud, I’ll give ’em a wink and they know what we had deep down inside.”
Durant also tells Stein that his so-called “feud” with Russell Westbrook was a product of the media:
“I realized that earlier on in the season,” Durant said, explaining his contention that it’s “fake drama.”
“I was doing an interview with someone and I used the word ‘unselfish’ to describe my teammates here [with] the Warriors and someone asked Russell the question, asked if he heard what I said about being unselfish and he phrased the question as if I was saying that the Thunder and the organization and the team was selfish. And once I heard that, I was like, ‘They are trying to get in between this thing and make it bigger than what it is.’
“Obviously Russell wasn’t going to hear that [full] interview I had about me just talking about my teammates I have now and someone in Oklahoma City phrased it to him as if I was calling them selfish. It’s that easy. It’s that easy for the media to twist something up and for the media, you know, [to] make a feud between us.”
It’s hard to believe that there’s been zero non-media-created bad blood between Westbrook and Durant, but there’s no denying that the media exacerbated their strained relationship. To certain media members in search of a story, any praise that Durant gave to his new team was secretly a backhanded slight to his old one. It is the media’s job to report on facts, not infer hidden meanings that may not actually exist.
