Kevin Durant opens up on trade request

Why didn’t things splinter apart after all the Kyrie [Irving] stuff — why have you guys come back together now when things could have easily exploded? Kevin Durant: Because we was together regardless. I think coming into the training camp, we understood that it’s going to be a lot on us from a media standpoint, from just the noise in general around our team, so I think that made us tighter once camp started. So we was able to take the Kyrie stuff and move in stride because we were already stuck together before that. We started to win some games, started to get better as a team, and do some things out there that work for us. And now it seems like everything was patched all together, but it felt like it was always cool, to be honest. -via ESPN / January 6, 2023

Over the summer, when you decided to come back, why were you so confident that you guys still could compete for a title? I don’t even look at s— that way. My whole thing was like — are we, does the process matter to us? And that’s one thing I did know that people here enjoy, grinding. So that was the most important thing for me. Titles and stuff come with the process in which you — how you prepare. It was more so, “All right, are we going to practice harder? Are we going to pay more attention to detail?” Not just everybody else, all of us, me included. Is that going to be preached to us every day? I had the faith that that would happen because I voiced that throughout the summer as well. Even behind the scenes, like, “Yo, this is what I like to do. This is how I like to practice.” I’ve been saying that for the last couple years, so I figured at that point with me going through that, they understood what I value. That’s what I was hanging my hat on, the preparation side of it. -via ESPN / January 6, 2023

For all the advice Durant has given to others, he eschewed getting an advisor during his own recovery. He could have talked to DeMarcus Cousins, his teammate for 30 games in Golden State, or Rudy Gay, both of whom tore their Achilles before him. Instead, he decided to go it alone. “It was more by choice for me,” Durant said. “People can tell me how I’ll feel and what I’ll go through but I just wanted to experience it with no perspectives but just mine.” -via The Athletic / January 5, 2023