© Troy Taormina | 2018 Nov 15
The NBA’s hiatus has not stopped Kevin Durant’s habit of becoming headline news. This has been especially true over the past month, thanks to Ethan Strauss’s book on Durant’s final season in Golden State, and a media tour by Draymond Green, who spoke more openly than ever on the issues he and the team had with KD during the 2018-19 season.
One of the criticisms levied by Green was the way in which Durant chose to handle his exit, by not only refusing to speak about his plans for the 2019 offseason, but his open annoyance that such a thing was even a storyline. Green said this “elephant in the room” led to a whole host of problems, and was the catalyst for the explosive confrontation between the two on that fateful night in Los Angeles.
While Durant hasn’t yet responded to Draymond’s criticism, KD’s agent, Rich Kleiman, argued that had Durant handled his exit differently, the criticism would’ve been the same.
“Kevin and I haven’t spoken about [Draymond’s comments] since that day,” Kleiman told The Athletic’s “Tampering” podcast. “I don’t necessarily agree with that ‘He should have let us know’ because nothing is as black and white as that. It’s like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. He didn’t know at certain times. You go back and forth on how you feel. Everybody does throughout the course of a season. You gonna make a declaration on something when you really don’t know how you’re going to feel, you don’t know anything. Look what happened to him in the Finals. No one knows any of this.
“So just think about how that would have played into effect. Imagine if people said ‘Earlier in the year, Kevin said he’s not coming back’ and the way they would have been talking about it. All of that, when you really break it down, made no sense. And he didn’t know.”
Kleiman’s take here is reasonable, but it also assumes that KD only had two options when it came to handling his contract year. Kleiman seems to believe that the criticism levied at Durant came because he refused to answer questions about his future, but ignores a third scenario where Durant was more diplomatic in the face of media scrutiny. A good test case for this strategy would be LeBron James, who did not face the same sort of circus during contract years in Cleveland, in part because he accepted that questions would be asked of him, and because he was consistant in answering those questions.
Durant’s erratic behavior and lack of patience towards those type of inquiries had as much to do with the media’s obsession with his future as anything else. It would’ve been interesting to see how things might have been different if every discussion about KD’s uncertain future was treated by the superstar as something other than a personal attack.