Imagine if Kevin Durant took Kendrick Perkins' advice.
Perkins recently made an appearance on The Vertical Podcast with Adrian Wojnarowski and provided some interesting insight on Durant's decision to leave the Thunder and join the Warriors.
Perkins talked to Durant before he made his decision and actually suggested Durant go somewhere else if he was actually going to leave OKC.
“I actually talked with Kevin, and to be honest, I really didn’t think he was leaving. And to be honest, I thought if he left – because he asked me – I said, ‘Listen, man, if you leave? My honest opinion, if you really want to leave, the other team that I think you should go to, in my opinion, is the San Antonio Spurs.’ And I told him this flat-out. I said, ‘If you’re leaving Oklahoma City, that first-class organization, I don’t know too much about Golden State. But I do know – I ain’t never been in San Antonio, but I done been around to know enough – and I told him that would be the place. But I told him at the end of the day – and he can tell you this – I said, ‘It’s not how I feel. It’s now how your momma feel. It’s not how your agent feel.’ I said, ‘You have to go what’s in your heart.’ And we talked maybe – this was a conversation that probably was had about June 25 or something like that. And I didn’t talk to him no more. I didn’t want to call him. Me and him didn’t need to talk. And then when I woke up that morning and seen he signed with Golden State, it was just kinda like, ‘Wow.’”
The Spurs were one of the teams Durant did meet with. If KD would have chosen San Antonio, it would have been pretty shocking as well.
The Warriors beat the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals but OKC and the Spurs have been rivals for years. With the Thunder beating the Spurs the round prior, maybe that worked against San Antonio when it came to landing KD.
Perkins added that he's OK with Durant making the decision to leave, but he does think KD should have done it in a slightly different way.
“It’s cool that KD – you’re a man, you decide the decision that you want to make. But at the end of the day, there’s a way about how you go about it. You don’t send Russ a text and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to the Warriors.’ No. You do like LeBron James did when he left Miami. He went down and he sat and had diner with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade to tell him that he was leaving, that he was gonna sign with Cleveland. That’s what you do. That’s what you do. That carries a long way. It don’t take you nothing to call Nick Collison and Russell Westbrook and go and sit down and have a conversation with them and say, ‘Guys, hey look, it’s been fun. I still love y’all like my brothers. But I’m going to Golden State.’”
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