Draymond Green and Kevin Durant starred in the most controversial moment of the 2018/19 NBA season, where they go at it during a Golden State Warriors-Los Angeles Clippers game.
The big man and KD had some differences about what the Dubs should do in the offense during crunch time, failing to score and leading to a heated argument between the then teammates.
This sequence keeps making headlines to this day. Draymond and Kevin recently sat down to address it and discuss what really led to KD’s departure from the Bay. On a new episode of Bleacher Report’s “Chips,” Green and Durant talked about this, blaming Bob Myers and Steve Kerr for mishandling the situation (8.35).
Draymond: “How much did our argument against the Clippers drive you to leave the Warriors?”
KD: “It wasn’t the argument, it was the way everybody acted like it didn’t happen. Steve Kerr acted like it didn’t happen. Bob Myers tried to 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 shit all out. I remember watching ‘The Last Dance,” and when Scottie didn’t go into the game, the whole team in the locker room said, ‘Scottie that was f****d up that you did that.’ We needed that. We just needed to throw all of that shit out on the table and say, ‘Yo, Dray, K, that was f****d up that we even had to go through that. Let’s just wipe our hands of that and go finish the task.’ I don’t think we did that. We tried to dance around it. I just didn’t like how all of that, just the vibe between all of that, it just made shit weird to me. And I’d rather us, be who we say we are. Family first. Communication is key. Like we didn’t show that. And that’s what rubbed me the wrong way more than anything.”
Then Draymond told a part of the story when he met with Warriors officials, who urged him to apologize to Durant. The big man made it clear he was willing to make things ring, but nobody should tell him what to say.
“The only person that can make this right is me and K, and there’s nothing y’all can do, and y’all are going to f**k this up. And in my opinion, they f****d it up.”
KD agreed with Green on that part, saying they really messed things up between the two teammates. In the end, Durant would leave the Bay and sign with the Brooklyn Nets in the summer of 2019.
At the moment, everybody was convinced that was the turning point of KD’s relationship with the Warriors. They could do nothing to keep him on board, and Kyrie Irving had already convinced him to go to New York and join the Nets.
What started as a fairytale for the Warriors ended up full of controversies, with their superstar leaving amid rumors of his relationship with his teammates and coaches. Two years after that, Durant and the Dubs are fine. They embrace each other whenever they ran into one another, and this interview was a big proof of that.
Although that moment created a lot of tension for the team, there’s no problem now, and we see Durantula hanging out with former teammates like nothing ever happened.
