Kevin Durant was recently traded to the Houston Rockets, making it the fourth team he has been on since leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder, when they were the Seattle Supersonics, drafted him in 2007. Following this, they moved to Oklahoma City, drafted Russell Westbrook in 2008, and then drafted James Harden in 2009.
In his recent appearance on LeBron James’ Mind the Game podcast, Durant expressed his feelings about their 2012 NBA Finals run and how the Thunder expedited all of their timelines. He spoke to Steve Nash and LeBron James about how the Thunder exceeded their expectations and were not ready as a team to constantly compete for the championship.
“It’s a different era. I think we over– I think we exceeded expectations with that team, and when you reach the finals and you go through a run like that so quickly, I don’t think a GM or owner was ready for that. You’re expecting a team that’s 22-23 to you know–you sped up the timeline, all of us, you know, each individual player. Serge, you didn’t know, like he came out of nowhere, he came out here being the best shot blocker in the league. I’m averaging 30 at 21 years old, Russell is 22 years old as an all-star, James sixth man at 20, like so we exceeded the timeline so they weren’t ready for that.”
“And I don’t believe that’s just my theory, I don’t know exactly what Sam was thinking or the owner, but my theory is I don’t think they were ready exactly for us to be contenders every year. So since then, since we reached the Finals, you’re supposed to upgrade and fine-tune and make changes around, instead of you can’t just pull one of the key figures of your team off the team and expect us to continue what we were doing.”
“So I just think they were kind of shocked at how good we got so fast. And you know sometimes you get confused, and then on top of that Sam Presti was probably what 30 something years old, everybody was young trying to figure stuff out trying to understand what this landscape was–it was too fast it was just we were ahead of our time, everything happened too quickly.”
Durant further added how he believed that the Thunder’s initial experience with having a lot of highly valuable assets in the 2012 NBA Finals run taught them how to manage key assets and build for their 2025 NBA championship run.
“First team All-NBA at 21, like doing things at 20-21, not just me but everybody on our team on smaller, different skills. Even our coaches, Scott Brooks, who was in his first season, was the coach of the year, you know what I’m saying? So everybody was doing things, and Scott was our interim, so I didn’t, you know, probably didn’t think that Scott was going to be there that long after being the interim, you know, so we all exceeded expectations. And you need a lot, you’ve got to spend money if you want to be in contention every year, I don’t think they were ready for that just yet so but that prepared them for what they got now.”
In terms of personal achievements, Durant’s run with the Thunder was arguably the best in his entire career. He accomplished essentially everything with the Thunder except winning an NBA championship. He averaged 27.4 points, 7.0 rebounds, and 3.7 assists in the regular season games and seven All-Star selections and five All-NBA First Team selections during his time with the Thunder, as well as the regular season MVP in 2014.
In his three seasons with the Thunder, Harden averaged 12.7 points, 3.4 rebounds and 2.5 assists before he was traded to the Rockets. Westbrook ended up being the longest-tenured Thunder player in this trio. He went on to win a regular-season MVP award himself and multiple All-Star selections with the Thunder. In his Thunder career, he averaged 23.0 points, 8.4 assists, and 7.0 rebounds per game.
Do you think the Thunder’s experience of mismanaging highly valuable assets in the 2012 run (Westbrook, Harden, and Durant) in effect taught them how to build for their 2025 NBA championship run? Let us know what you think in the comments section.
