Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant still recalls what it was like to change teams for the first time, asphyxiated by a fan base that long claimed to be loyal to him through his nine seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Durant remembers walking back into Chesapeake Energy Arena, only to find the people who once cheered for him and the faces he saw everyday in the organization disgusted as he donned a Golden State Warriors jersey:
“Such a venomous toxic feeling when I walked into that arena,” Durant told J.R. Moehringer of WSJ. Magazine. “And just the organization, the trainers and equipment managers, those dudes is pissed off at me? Ain’t talking to me? I’m like, Yo, this is where we going with this? Because I left a team and went to play with another team?”
At first it seemed like the anger was driven by Russell Westbrook and that alpha male aura he emanated to the rest of the roster, but apparently the franchise took part in that same behavior, according to Durant. His mother Wanda still recalls a video in which a Thunder fan fired bullets into Durant's No. 35 jersey.
Durant had not only scored thousands of points for the Thunder franchise, but been an active participant in the community and donated millions of dollars for tornado relief funds. However those displays of hatred were enough for Durant to completely detach from the city he called home for the vast part of a decade:
“I’ll never be attached to that city again because of that,” said Durant. “I eventually wanted to come back to that city and be part of that community and organization, but I don’t trust nobody there. That shit must have been fake, what they was doing. The organization, the GM, I ain’t talked to none of those people, even had a nice exchange with those people, since I left.”
It seems that Durant's exit from OKC was as toxic as it can get. Both regular-season games at Chesapeake were a spectacle of rancor and disgust for the one they hailed as their franchise star, the 2014 MVP in Oklahoma City colors. Now it appears that a return to the Thunder is hardly even a possibility unless something drastic changes as Durant plays out the second half of his NBA career.
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