Setting the record straight on Kevin Durant and the Suns

Kevin Durant is aware of what’s being said about him and the Phoenix Suns, and in an interview with Yahoo! Sports’ Vincent Goodwill, he tried to set the record straight. There’s no better time to join in that effort.

In his sit-down with Goodwill, Durant was asked about the “trade rumors” from a few weeks ago. Those rumors began when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski’s report on a Houston Rockets trade — which landed a few of the Suns’ future draft picks from the Brooklyn Nets — included a tidbit about Houston’s desire to package those picks for a win-now star like Durant.

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith then went on First Take and “reported” that people should “pay no attention to what Phoenix is saying, they want out of Kevin Durant right now.”

Multiple sources confirmed to PHNX Sports that this was completely false, and everything — from Woj noting that the Suns wanted to run it back, to Smith having to include an incredible phrase like “pay no attention to what Phoenix is saying,” to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst mentioning that Durant had not asked for a trade — should’ve indicated that this was a nothing story.

Of course the Rockets would have interest in players like Kevin Durant or Devin Booker! Who wouldn’t? But somehow, Houston’s one-sided interest — coupled with the Rockets acquiring picks that Phoenix originally gave up to get Durant — morphed into further questions about Durant’s happiness in the Valley and whether the Suns already had buyer’s remorse 17 months after landing him.

Never mind that both Mat Ishbia and James Jones publicly shot down these trade rumors multiple times. Never mind that the PHNX Suns Podcast and multiple other outlets in the Valley had been saying for months that the Suns wanted to run it back next season, that they weren’t trading the Big 3, and that their best path forward was through continuity, better health and a new head coach.

People will always take speculation and run with it, so naturally, when Durant was asked about all of these “trade rumors,” he addressed the predictably obnoxious nature of it all.

“It’s hard not to hear what they got to say about you,” Durant told Yahoo! Sports. “Especially when you could just make up lies and everybody gonna believe you. You could just press the ‘KD wanna leave’ button anytime you want some attention.

“It’s for sure a button. What else is gonna get people going around this time? ‘Oh, the journeyman is leaving again.’ That storyline’s gonna always hit. That’s why they shoot you the alerts on ESPN on your phone: ‘Oh, KD’s thinking about leaving.’ That’s how big that story is, which is wack, ’cause I’ve been talking to Phoenix every day since the season ended. Our GMs, coaches, everybody, we’ve been locked in. So to hear somebody say, ‘Phoenix wants to get out of the KD [business],’ I’m sitting here like, ‘Where is this coming from?'”

Conjuring up trade scenarios is part of any NBA offseason — we’ve done it here ourselves. The difference is, we prefaced ours with a mountain of disclaimers that these deals would never happen, that neither KD nor the Suns were seeking a trade, and that we were doing these thought exercises for every Sun under contract in order to show what was possible under the new CBA.

On the national scope, however, it’s a situation where Kevin Durant’s reputation seems to take on a life of its own, to the point where logic — and everything he and the Suns have said about their partnership — goes right out the window in favor of sensationalism. It’s a treatise on the state of NBA discourse and the media machine that fuels it, but also on the various ways it impacts the public’s perception of Durant himself.

To that end, it’s worth setting the record straight on Kevin Durant and how we even got to this point.

For Kevin Durant, hoops should always outshine narrative

We often bemoan how the majority of athletes lean on tired sports cliches in interviews, but when they provide true insight into what they’re thinking or how they’re feeling, we clutch our pearls faster than we can utter, “Well, not like that.”

Durant has always displayed a keen transparency when responding to questions. For all his eccentricities, ask him an actual X’s and O’s question, and you’ll get a thorough response that taps into his basketball genius. Ask about all that off-court stuff, however, and Durant won’t hold back when he encounters a question that he knows could perpetuate more false narratives. He keeps it real, but as Dave Chappelle once taught us, sometimes keeping it real goes wrong.

To that point, some people love Durant’s willingness to directly address the rumors that frequently circulate around him, or his tendency to clap back on Twitter against narratives he feels are unfair. Others interpret his status as one of the more “online” athletes as being “sensitive” — as if being a millionaire means you should automatically stop caring what people think about you, or that being a megastar means you should simply accept how easily your reputation can be influenced by distorted truths.

“It bothers me that people lie like that and it bothers me that the audience eats up lies,” Durant told Goodwill. “Not necessarily the headline, ’cause I know it’s false, ’cause I know the relationships, but I get sad when people buy into lies or just make up shit. It’s bigger than ball at that point for me. But I can’t control that.”

One would imagine that type of slander is the reason Durant recoils when the word “legacy” comes up. He’s routinely observed how a player’s legacy is often determined by other people’s opinions, rather than what he actually does on the court. Durant is acutely aware of how this current age of social media and national talking heads can adversely affect public perception, distracting from the beauty of the game itself.

Basketball has always been priority No. 1 for Kevin Durant, but many NBA fans love the league because of the drama, the hot takes, the trade rumors, the player movement, the petty beefs, the discourse — pretty much everything except the game itself.

Ask the average NBA fan to explain a Spain pick-and-roll and they’ll be stumped, but ask that same fan which superstars aren’t good enough to be the main option on a championship team, and they’ll have plenty to say. It’s the central thesis behind one of Durant’s most famous tweets, which is as true today as it was three years ago:

It wasn’t a surprise, then, to hear Durant lament how this latest batch of trade rumors could once again threaten to diminish fans’ joy in watching one of the all-time greats continue to do what he does best.

“That’s my thing, don’t let that blind you from what I’m doing on the basketball court, ’cause that could irritate you as a fan,” Durant said. “Like, ‘Damn, this [guy] is leaving again?’ But it’s like, yo — even if I do leave, am I playing good basketball, though? Like, what matters? Does it matter that I got a jersey on, or is it the basketball I’m playing?”

In his age-35 season, Durant earned Second Team All-NBA honors by putting up 27.1 points, 6.6 rebounds, 5.0 assists, 1.2 blocks and 0.9 steals per game while shooting 52.3 percent from the field, 41.3 percent from 3 and 85.6 percent from the foul line. According to Stathead, he and LeBron James (twice) are the only players in NBA history to ever put up a 27-6-5 stat line at that age, and Durant’s 62.6 percent true shooting was the best among that group.

We have literally never seen a more efficient, high-scoring season from an NBA star at that point in their career, but are we talking about that? At all? Or are we honing in on “leadership,” declaring the Big 3 a failed experiment after one season together, and playing body language police on a nightly basis to try and pinpoint the exact moment where “Kevin Durant wants out”?

“Some of that stuff gets frustrating, ’cause I want better for the fans,” Durant told Yahoo! Sports. “I want them to enjoy the experience, but when you’re thinking about narratives and lies like that, it’s like, damn, our game is way more pure and more beautiful than that, you know? Let’s try to look past that and focus just on the game. Like, some of this stuff is out [of] your control, and some of this shit is just lies.”

Combatting misconceptions around Kevin Durant and the Suns

It’s understandable why people — and even Suns fans — are down on the team’s prospects at the moment. Even with two All-NBA performers and a third star on the roster, Phoenix got swept in the first round of the playoffs. Individual brilliance is fun, but it’s harder to appreciate when the broader context is a championship-starved organization once again falling short of the ultimate goal. A 49-win season shouldn’t feel as disjointed as it did either.

But a lot of the negative sentiment around this team stems from perception as much as reality, reputation as much as fact. It starts with the notion that Durant is some notorious malcontent, a ticking time bomb who forces his way to super-teams the moment things get difficult.

And yet, comb through his actual career arc, and you’ll remember he stayed with the Seattle SuperSonics/Oklahoma City Thunder for nine years before the criticism over his lack of a championship prompted him to leave. At the time, the prevailing hurdles holding KD back were OKC’s decision to play it cheap by letting James Harden walk, as well as Russell Westbrook’s erratic play.

But as soon as Durant did what everyone wanted and left for a better team that gave him an opportunity to win titles, all that got swept under the rug because of how he left. That 3-1 lead over the mighty Golden State Warriors in the 2016 Western Conference Finals somehow distracted people from the fact that Durant had reached his ceiling in OKC, because everyone focused on how close they were to breaking through rather than, you know, the 3-1 collapse itself.

So then KD “broke the league” by joining a 73-win team, and he was the Finals MVP in back-to-back title runs. If not for injuries during the 2019 postseason, the Warriors probably would’ve three-peated. But because they lost, because of all the criticism over Durant making the Dubs unfair, and because of the overwhelming sense that things had run their course, he appeased NBA fans by leaving for the Brooklyn Nets in free agency.

Durant built a new Big 3 with Kyrie Irving and James Harden, but they couldn’t stay on the court together. Injury wasn’t the only factor there; Irving being a total head case played a significant role. His refusal to abide by New York’s vaccination rules during the COVID-19 pandemic and his sharing of an antisemitic documentary led to Irving missing far more games than he should have. Harden saw the writing on the wall and got out of Dodge when he had the chance.

If anything, Durant was loyal to a fault in Brooklyn, failing to see that he had placed his trust in the wrong set of co-stars until it was impossible to ignore. He requested a trade in the summer of 2022, which he later rescinded when the Nets called his bluff. But Irving remained a PR nightmare, a distraction and a flight risk, and when he forced his way out on Feb. 6, it was only then that Durant got what he wanted with a trade to Phoenix three days later.

Ironically enough, every time Kevin Durant left one situation for another, he was inadvertently making the smart move that people claimed they wanted. When he left OKC, he got away from Westbrook and found an opportunity to win rings, and he did so as a free agent. When he left the Warriors, he restored balance to the league and tried to build something new…once again, as a free agent.

And when he left Brooklyn, it was the only time he forced his way out of a situation by requesting a trade, and that only happened after battling through multiple seasons of injury woes and Irving’s off-court circus. Was he supposed to play out his remaining years on middling Nets teams, with Spencer Dinwiddie as his second option, just so people would finally praise him for being “loyal”?

Or is it fair to acknowledge that loyalty is a two-way street in this league, and that every time Kevin Durant left for greener pastures, he was justified in doing so?

That’s not to say Durant is blameless. The Suns needed more out of him during this year’s playoff sweep, and having six head coaches since leaving Golden State is a tough look. Even if Durant didn’t play an active role in getting anyone fired, a head coach’s job security is inextricably tied to the support (and success) of his superstars.

However, pinning the firings of any of those head coaches on Durant is unfair and simply furthers the very agenda we’re seeing play out in real time. And it’s not like the anti-KD sentiment is the only one in play here either.

Devin Booker has become easy to hate on because people were wrong about him, because they think he’s overrated or because of his playoff failures. There’s also a natural tendency to root against super-teams, and that’s especially true under the new CBA, where having an owner willing to blow past the second tax apron is somehow viewed as a bad thing because of the restrictions that come with it.

Never mind that we just saw contenders like the Denver Nuggets and LA Clippers take the cheaper way out, losing quality players to avoid the limitations of the second apron. Never mind that if any franchise deserved an owner who was willing to spend after decades under Robert Sarver — who avoided the luxury tax as routinely as common decency in the workplace — it would be the Suns.

For some reason, people will only praise NBA owners for being willing to spend if their teams win it all, and even then, it can just be twisted into just “buying a championship.” In the meantime, Mat Ishbia will face unfair labels like “new owner syndrome” or “shortsighted,” because the Suns failed in year one, they’re all in on their current window, and they had to sacrifice draft picks to do it.

After 55-plus years without a title and a whole decade of draft busts in the 2010s, why is stockpiling picks and rebuilding seen as “smart,” while running it back with a core of established stars like Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal viewed as “doomed”? The false narrative that Phoenix has no picks from now until 2031 plays a role, but too often, NBA analysis boils down to projections instead of letting things play out and judging them after the fact. It’s choosing the proverbial mystery box over the boat, because the mystery box could be anything — it could even be a boat!

But the Suns have a boat, right here, right now, in Kevin Durant. And even if history has taught us nothing, hopefully the words coming directly from his mouth serve as a reminder that this particular boat laid anchor in Phoenix for a reason.