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Why Has Addition Of Kevin Durant Turned NBA Fans Against Warriors?

By Ty OKeefe
Published on: 06:46 PST, Jul 22, 2016

During the last two years, the Golden State Warriors have won their way into the hearts of basketball fans everywhere thanks to the play of second generation NBA’ers Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and a pair of appearances in the NBA Finals.

Despite dropping their second seven-game showdown with the Cleveland Cavaliers in this year’s NBA Finals, the Warriors were never in danger of entering the off-season as anything but one of the league’s most popular teams. After a record-setting, 73-win season, not much can go wrong, and it’s not as if free agency offered any threat to a team that’s returning it’s core of NBA All-Stars.

However, since becoming the surprise winners of the Kevin Durant sweepstakes and eclipsing the business of basketball by forming a ”super-team” for the ages, the Warriors have somehow turned into the NBA’s Evil Empire in the eyes of many who believe that they’re trying to buy championships.

For Durant, someone who’s always been seen as an all-around good guy of the same caliber as Curry, the unexpected decision to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder has brought on a wave of criticism from fans, NBA legends, and armchair experts that the former Texas Longhorn just isn’t used to. The Thunder’s fan-base is heartbroken, Golden State’s rivals are fuming, and initially, even Durant himself was shaken by the weight of his own decision.

While preparing for this summer’s Olympics with Team USA in Las Vegas, Durant told reporters a now-infamous tale that illustrated just how much the decision to leave the only NBA home he’s ever known has affected him.

”For a few days after, I didn’t leave my bed, because I was like, ‘If I walk outside somebody might just hit me with their car, or say anything negative to me.’ Like I said, I never had this reputation, and so many people who don’t even watch basketball are telling me congratulations and good luck going forward,” said Durant via ESPN. ”It’s crazy how big I got and how big this got.”

”I mean, I’ve been somewhere for so long, and then to make a change like that, [which] nobody knew was coming, that nobody didn’t think I would do, of course I didn’t know how it would be received afterwards,” continued Durant. ”But at some point, I just said, ‘Look, man, life goes on, and I can’t hide forever,’ so I just had to face it.”

Only a few days before Durant transformed the Hamptons rental home that hosted his high-priced NBA recruitment into a personal prison, key players, front office personnel, and coaches from the Warriors, Thunder, L.A. Clippers, Miami Heat, and Boston Celtics had descended upon the East Coast’s Hollywood Hills in an attempt to lure one of the league’s elite to their city.

Good guy reputation or not, the environment that Durant chose to hear his many offers undoubtedly bothered some folks. Since LeBron James abandoned the Cavs to ”take his talents to South Beach” in the summer of 2010, the idea of forming a so-called ”super team” hasn’t sat well with many basketball fans, and until very recently, Durant was seen as someone who’d always choose loyalty over championships.

But humble and the Hamptons have never mixed, and on top of irritating countless hoop heads by setting up shop miles from Oklahoma City, Durant has also been criticized by Boston’s Jae Crowder for allegedly misleading the Celtics into believing that he was bolting to Beantown while gaining inside knowledge of team strategies during the recruiting process that could potentially help Golden State down the road.

During an appearance at the Basketball Hall Of Fame earlier this week, Crowder told MassLive.com exactly what he feels Durant did at the Celtics’ sales pitch—which was attended by New England Patriots’ starting quarterback Tom Brady, to earn the anger of his on-court colleagues.

”We were the only team in the NBA to beat [Cleveland and Golden State] on their home court. The only team in the NBA, the Boston Celtics,” said Crowder. ”We told him that. We played him clips from both games and told him basically the scouting report of how we guarded Steph [Curry] and Klay [Thompson]–our entire game plan, basically. That’s what made me mad. We [expletive] told him everything we do to beat these guys, and we beat them, and he went and joined them.”

At the moment, the Thunder’s fan-base isn’t just dealing with Durant’s devastating departure. They’re also adjusting to the thought of a shockingly sudden rebuild caused by Durant’s decision and the likely loss of point guard Russell Westbrook. A few months ago, Oklahoma City was an NBA hotbed of hope, and now that hope has turned to hatred.

Throughout their thrilling rise, one of the things that’s made the Warriors so popular was the fact that their core of Curry, Thompson, and Draymond Green were all drafted by Golden State. Basically, until now they’ve been the anti-Cavaliers.

But all that changed when Durant signed on the dotted line, and whether it’s fair or not, adding just one of the league’s best and a career fan-favorite has inexplicably turned the tide of public opinion against both Durant and the once-lovable Warriors.

[Photo By-Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images]

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