The 2016 NBA Finals will always be remembered for two things — the Cleveland Cavaliers winning their first NBA title and the Golden State Warriors becoming the first team to squander a 3-1 series edge in The Finals. Kevin Durant was one of many watching that series unfold from home after his Oklahoma City Thunder blew their own 3-1 series lead (in the Western Conference finals). In an interview yesterday, Durant says the Warriors’ Finals flub helped him decide to leave OKC for Golden State, writes Anthony Slater of The Mercury News:
The Warriors organization was named the 2016 ENCORE winner on Monday night. It’s a prestigious award, given by the Stanford Graduate School of Business to the entrepreneurial company of the year. Past winners include Google, Apple and Twitter. This is the first time a sports organization has won it.
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The unique setting produced some candid comments, particularly surrounding Durant’s free agency decision. Here’s a rundown of the most interesting nuggets.
– If the Warriors close out the Cavs and win the Finals, does Durant really join the back-to-back champs? Before Monday night, Durant brushed off that question: “They didn’t,” he has said twice. But about 30 minutes into the panel discussion, Andre Iguodala, deep into an answer about the lingering burn of losing the Finals, said: “If we would’ve won, I don’t know if we would’ve got him,” pointing at Durant. That led the moderator, Geoff Yang, to flip that question to Durant. Perhaps it was the different setting, but KD finally chose to answer it, hinting that, no, he likely wouldn’t be in the Bay Area had the Warriors closed it out.
“Would it have made it less interesting to you?”
Durant: “I was telling one of my friends, Rich (Kleiman, his agent), who’s here, we were watching Game 7. Well, as it started to unfold, it was, ‘No question, no way could you go to this team.’ And I was just like a kid, like, in a candy shop. I’d get wide open 3s, I could just run up and down the court, get wide open layups. I was basically begging him. I was like, yo, this would be nice. So as I was thinking about my decision and who I was gonna play for, this team came to mind. You know, as they lost, it became more and more real every day. You start to think about it even more. To see if I would fit. Then once I sat down with these guys, everything that I wanted to know about them they kinda showed me. But we don’t have to talk about it though because they didn’t get the job done and they came after me and who knows what would’ve happened. But I guess you could say I’m glad that they lost.”
– The Warriors met with Durant on July 1st. By late afternoon July 3rd, he’d wrapped up his free agency meetings. There were rumblings that night that the Warriors were frontrunners. But his decision didn’t come until about noon on July 4th. On Monday, Lacob reflected on a stressful July 3rd, which included a 3-way phone call — between Lacob, Durant and Myers — where he received his first indication that Durant was leaning toward Golden State.
Joe Lacob: “So, KD, after we met with you on July 4th weekend out on the very tip of Long Island, a long way to go. We had a good meeting and we went home. Bob (Myers) and I were talking like we do all the time. On July 3rd, I was in Montana at the time, I’m on a boat. I get this call, from Bob, ‘Durant’s on the phone!’ I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s gonna work, it might cut out.’ You remember this call?
Kevin Durant: “Yeah.”
Lacob: “Then we started to talk and I’m thinking: ‘He’s gonna make the decision. And he said, ‘So when I come…’ and then I don’t remember what else I said. Then there was a long pause and I was like, ‘Did…he…just…say…he…was…coming?’ Then it was, ‘Well, I gotta sleep on it tonight.’ That was hard. I just want you to know that was so hard.”
Durant: “Yeah, when I called you guys, so many emotions were going through my head. I thought I was gonna drag that decision out for a long time. But when I talked to you guys that second time, it kinda eased my mind. I felt like this was the place where I should be.”
– Later, Durant was asked for a fuller explanation on why he picked the Warriors. He called it an ‘easy choice’: “It felt like it was a perfect fit. It was something I was searching for when I sat down and talked to these guys. I wanted to see if what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen on the outside is really true. Do these guys really genuinely love each other? They work together. You hear family a lot. That’s just a word sometimes, but this is really a lifestyle here. You can feel it when you walk in the door, in the practice facility, everybody is just together. That’s something that I can appreciate as a basketball player and someone who values relationships. You can tell that that’s what they stand on, that’s what we stand on. I feel really grateful to play for a team like that and play with a bunch of players who are selfless and enjoy the game in its purest form. They make it about the players, they make it about the environment, so it was really an easy choice.”
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– Iguodala’s free agency decision, made three summers earlier, has parallels with Durant’s. He was eliminated by them in the playoffs. He saw how much fun they were having on the court. He decided he wanted to be a part of it.
Kevin Durant on the free agency meeting: “I was anxious to see what they’re all about. You hear a lot of about them. They’e on SportsCenter every day. One thing stood out to me, I had a friend tell me — that never played basketball, not even athletic — the first thing she said was, ‘When I watch Steph Curry play, it makes me feel like I can play the game of basketball.’ So I asked her, ‘So how do I make you feel?’…That shows, like Andre said, when you play freely and have fun with the game, it just shows that it touches a lot of people that may not just be in that immediate circle of NBA or basketball or sports in general. So when they came into the meeting, I was really looking for that energy and I felt it from the beginning. It was just so pure. It was a feeling I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to be a part of it. No matter what happened, I wanted to be a part of it.”
