With his free agency decision looming, Kevin Durant was rooting for the Cleveland Cavaliers during the NBA Finals.
KD, it turns out, had already made up his mind about joining the Golden State Warriors, and for optics, wanted them to lose the championship before he signed on the dotted line.
Joe Lacob, Kevin Durant, Bob Myers and Andre Iguodala said a bunch of interesting things at Stanford on Monday night https://t.co/IT1EEjxAUO
— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) October 11, 2016
The former MVP was desperate to play for a squad that he knew would make his life on the court that much easier and more fulfilling.
Per the Mercury News:
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.”
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