Brooklyn Nets: What to make of Draymond Green’s comments on Kevin Durant

Draymond Green made comments about how he didn’t like how Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant handled last year’s free agency. What should we make of them?

As the entire basketball world, including Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant, watched the first two episodes of “The Last Dance” over the weekend, former teammate Draymond Green likened former Chicago Bulls general manager Jerry Krause‘s decision to remove Phil Jackson as head coach after the 1997-98 season to Durant’s free agency in 2019; only he wishes the two-time Finals MVP took the same route as the legendary coach.

"“It definitely hit close to home,” Green said on Uninterrupted’s “WRTS: After Party” show. “I think what Phil did was great, which is acknowledge the elephant in the room. Because all year, if Phil doesn’t do that, all year everyone else is dealing with that somewhere. So now once you get these questions from the media, we’ve already addressed that as a team. We really don’t need to talk about that. And our season was a little different from the standpoint of it was contracts, but it was on players. It wasn’t necessarily the organization.”"

Green also claims that he and Klay Thompson expressed a desire to stay with the Golden State Warriors whenever members of the media would ask questions about their next contracts, whereas Durant would try to avoid answering those questions altogether.

Things eventually reached a breaking point for Green during their own last dance as teammates, as a video went viral with the two getting into a screaming match during a timeout in the final seconds of a road game against the Los Angeles Clippers, with the Warriors eventually losing that game.

Green reportedly told Durant to leave because they didn’t need him, as they already won a championship without him.

"“I mean, your teammate talked to you that way, you think about it a bit,” Durant said. “We talked about it, but [it] definitely [was a factor], for sure. I’m not going to lie about it.”“I wish that wouldn’t have happened. Every day it was about my free agency. Every day was about my disposition as a player. What I looked like on the bench. What I looked like during the games. It opened up a lot of nonsense that could’ve been avoided.”"

Now I can’t say Durant always handled his situation in Golden State perfectly, but what I can say is that Durant always sacrificed his ego for the betterment of his team.

Durant sacrificed nearly $10 million after winning his first championship with the Warriors in 2017 to help them keep very important pieces Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston in the fold, and another $5 million in 2018, which eventually allowed them to sign DeMarcus Cousins.

Despite being the clearcut best player on the team, he deferred to Stephen Curry as the face of the franchise and sacrificed potential scoring titles and regular-season MVP awards to be a part of a historically great team.

Durant also literally sacrificed his own body to try and win another championship despite already going down with a calf injury in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals against the Houston Rockets, as he came back in Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals to try and give his team a much-needed spark being down 3-1 to the Toronto Raptors in the series.

Durant, looking like his normal self, scored 11 points in the first quarter. However, he dropped to the floor in the second quarter and started grabbing his right calf area, and limped off the floor into the locker room, and was ultimately diagnosed with a right Achilles tear.

KD is still recovering from that injury but is appearing to look as good as new in recent videos posted on social media.

Green still appears to be upset that Durant wasn’t straight up with him or the rest of the Warriors about his intentions after the season much like Jackson and Jordan were to their teammates, but Green is missing a very important factor here. Krause chose to get rid of Jackson no matter what, and Jordan was getting older, so he wasn’t about to start over on a completely new team when he could be at peace with six rings and retire to his loving family (MJ, of course, would unretire in 2001 and join the Washington Wizards).

Warriors GM Bob Myers never gave Durant that same ultimatum, and given that the former MVP had already sacrificed so much to win two championships with the Warriors, he had a right to move on to Brooklyn and team up with his best friend Kyrie Irving for a new challenge on the opposite coast.

The main focus should also always be to win a championship during the season and not let any media speculation get in the way of achieving that goal.

It’s noble of Green to pledge loyalty to the Warriors for the long-term whenever he had the chance to do so, but maybe he should reserve his criticism for Durant not doing the same; especially when he literally called him while sitting in his car in the Oracle Arena parking lot and lobbied for him to join the team following a Game 7 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2016 NBA Finals.