Kevin Durant is joining the fifth team of his career as he moves to Houston to try to help the Rockets win their first championship in 30 years. Durant’s last two stops have not gone according to plan, as the Nets and Suns both tried to build star-studded rosters around KD that never lived up to expectations as a title contender.
On the second part of the “Mind the Game” podcast with Durant as a guest alongside Steve Nash and LeBron James, Durant and Nash got into what went wrong in Brooklyn, as Nash was the head coach for just over two years. Beyond his ill-fated step on the three-point line in Game 7 against the Bucks — which LeBron prodded about to start the conversation — Durant pointed to injuries and all the chaos and distractions around them as what doomed their chances.
“We had this conversation in Portland, I think, right before a game and I’m like, ‘who am I spending my next five years with?’ I had just signed that deal, you had just signed a deal, it felt like we were secure but everything else around us was going to shit,” Durant said. “Not in a bad way, we got GMs going to other teams, we got coaches going to other teams, we got players forcing trades, we got bringing in Ben Simmons he’s back. There was so much bullshit around us, I felt like we were locked in on the same page and understanding we’re trying to do something special here. But, and I feel like your hands were tied a lot because as a coach you had to deal with so much.”
“I didn’t get to coach as much as I wanted to,” Nash said.
“That’s what it was. I didn’t feel like we got the full Steve Nash like I wanted, like you probably wanted. I feel like it was just too many distractions in a way, and you know you can’t win that way,” Durant continued. “But I felt like we had great intentions though. I feel like we cared enough. I feel like every day we were trying to push towards winning a championship. It was a great vibe in there. It’s some of the best times I’ve had. That first year, that’s why I signed that deal, that first year, man, most fun ball I had. Some of the most fun ball I had playing in my life. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed playing in Brooklyn a lot. I loved playing for Brooklyn, but it’s just so much around the guys who were committed to the situation but everybody else wasn’t. It just was weird.”
From Kyrie Irving’s absence due to his refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine to James Harden’s frustrations and eventual trade demands, there were plenty of distractions. Durant felt that while he and Nash were committed to doing things the right way, not everyone else was, and the result was a team that fractured and eventually broke apart.
They went on to discuss how injuries played the biggest role in the team not living up to expectations, with Nash noting Harden shouldn’t have been playing on his hamstring in their lone playoff run in 2021. Nash indicated he struggles with how to look back on his time in Brooklyn, saying he feels like he failed the team but also knows there was a ton of stuff that was out of his hands. However, Durant insisted the fault lay beyond Nash and kept making reference to a locker room that wasn’t on the same page, noting Nash often had to serve as a “principal” more than coach.
