Kevin Durant and Draymond Green both have personalities that often compel them to be at loggerheads, especially considering how passionate they both are about the game.
The former teammates, who played together on the Warriors, recently engaged in a back-and-forth after Draymond Green seemingly dissed Kevin Durant’s take on scoring being more important to win championships.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, Green addressed folks who believe that defense does not play a role in winning championships.
Draymond: “Those who don’t believe defense is as valuable as it is simply just don’t win. I don’t think anyone’s ever really been hell-bent on caring about the opinion of those that don’t win, because your opinion equals zero.”
Reporter: “So I hear you, but Kevin has won.”
Draymond: “He won here, (and) the defense here was…”
Reporter: “It was incredible.”
Draymond: “Absolutely.”
Durant saw this exchange on social media and coldly pointed to facts that showed offense was the bigger focal point when the Warriors had their back-to-back championships.
“And the offense was????” wrote a puzzled Durant on X. The Warriors’ offense was first in the league while their defense wasn’t even top-10 in the league during the 2017 and 2018 championship runs. In fact, neither the Cavaliers nor the Warriors were a top-10 defensive team in the league in those years.
In essence, there seems to have been a misunderstanding of words somewhere. Durant never said offense was the only important thing in winning championships. However, Green seems to have understood that he felt defense has no role in winning a championship.
“They understand what I’m saying, but people purposely take my words outta context, you know mfers just wanna dunk on me lol,” wrote Durant on X while acknowledging that this is a misunderstanding, clearly.
“They take offense to everything I say. How ironic,” he further added. “I can feel the jealousy and insecurity through your burner account,” said the Rockets’ superstar when a fan criticized him for saying offense is more important than defense.
If you assign weightage to both things, Durant may have said offense is 70% important, implying defense is still 30% needed to get the win, or even a 60-40 split. But Green seems to believe that Durant thinks defense has no contribution in winning championships (i.e 0% value), which is far from the truth.
Eddie Gonzalez, a close friend of Durant’s, believes that Draymond Green only reacted due to his second nature of needing to respond when being baited by reporters, calling out his desire to replace Charles Barkley in the media. Durant has, on multiple occasions, acknowledged that defense is important as well, giving flowers to Draymond Green for his contributions, but offense is just more important in his opinion.
Even in the exchange mentioned above, Green never explicitly pointed to Durant until the reporter brought him up. Once Green understands how the media may have conveyed the wrong interpretation to him, he might likely reconsider his stance.
