In the summer of 2016, star forward Kevin Durant made a seismic career decision that rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. After his Oklahoma City Thunder blew a commanding 3-1 series lead in the Western Conference Finals to the Golden State Warriors, he decided to take his talents to the Bay Area and join that very same Golden State franchise.
The Warriors were also on the heels of a 2015-16 campaign during which they won a league-record 73 games. If it weren’t for the team blowing a 3-1 lead itself in the 2016 NBA Finals, Golden State would have captured its second consecutive title.
Durant recently admitted that some folks probably aren’t going to forget that he spurned the Thunder for the Warriors all those years ago, but he also doesn’t seem to care what people think.
“I mean, I’m sure some people not gonna let it go,” Durant said. “I wouldn’t say they mad and still angry about it, but I don’t think they gonna forget that I went to the Warriors, you know what I’m saying? That’s gonna always be a talking point when it comes to my career, but I don’t give a s—. We did some incredible things, and we had some of the most fun times of my life moving around as a Warrior. So, it’s going to be people that love it. It’s going to be people that hate it, man. But at the end of the day, it happened.”
While Durant did depart a Thunder team that had been knocking on the door of an appearance in the championship series, the Warriors were far and away the most successful team in the NBA during Durant’s three-season stint in Golden State.
The squad reached the NBA Finals in every one of Durant’s seasons in a Warriors uniform and won back-to-back championships in 2017 and 2018. To this day, Golden State is the most recent team to have won consecutive NBA titles, and the scoring machine took home Finals MVP awards in both of those title runs.
Durant is now years removed from his final season with the Warriors, but he’s still a special player in today’s NBA.
With the Phoenix Suns in the 2024-25 season, he’s averaging 26.9 points per game while shooting 53.0 percent from the field, 40.2 percent from 3-point range and 82.8 percent from the charity stripe. He went off for 37 points on 15-of-22 shooting from the floor against the Houston Rockets earlier this month.
Even if there maybe are those who will never let go of Durant’s decision to leave the Thunder almost one decade ago now, Warriors fans will always cherish his time with the team at the very least.
