NBA legend Charles Barkley firmly believes that the pressure is on Kevin Durant to prove he can be “THE GUY” after the Golden State Warriors' latest run to the NBA Finals.

Durant won two championships with the Warriors after he joined them in 2016. However, Barkley (like most NBA fans) doesn't count those two rings KD got because he joined a championship team already filled with All-Stars and took the easy road to the championship.

Now that the Warriors are back to the NBA Finals two years since Durant left, while the Nets forward has yet to reach the Eastern Conference Finals with Brooklyn, Barkley claimed that it hurts his legacy.

“You know it has an effect on his legacy,” Barkley explained, per New York Daily News. “If you go back and look, and I talked about it on the [TNT] show, LeBron has said it before — he said, ‘I had to win a championship without Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.’ And Kobe’s said it before, Rest in Peace, ‘I’ve got to win a championship without Shaq.'

“So Kevin and Kyrie [Irving], before we elevate them among the old guys, they’re not going to get the credit they deserve until they win a championship by themselves and be The Guy.”

True enough, a lot of people have poked fun on Kevin Durant after the Warriors reached the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight years. Most of the talks have been about how the Dubs never really needed KD and it was Durant who needed Golden State more.

While that is definitely an unfair point given that Durant played a big role in their two championships together, Charles Barkley's argument has some merits. Not a lot of people will dig deep into the situation and just see that the Warriors made it to the NBA Finals without Durant and nothing else.

With that said, until Durant wins the title with the Nets, that narrative will surely persist.