Waiters said<\/a>. \u201cTricked it off, bro. We\u2019re supposed to have went to the Finals against Cleveland. I feel like we would\u2019ve beat Cleveland.\u201d <\/p>\n\u201cKev left, went to GS.” he added. “Before that, KD text me and Serge like, how y\u2019all think about bringing this thing back for one more year? We\u2019re texting in the group message a couple of times, and I ain\u2019t hear back from KD about it.\u201d What followed was the moment that gave the story its title. \u201cRuss hit me up like, \u2018You see this s***? This s*** crazy.\u2019 That\u2019s when he called me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oklahoma City led the series 3-1 and held a double-digit lead in Game 6. Golden State came back to force a Game 7. Kevin Durant announced his decision to join the Warriors on July 4, 2016, in a Players\u2019 Tribune essay, ending months of speculation and immediately reshaping the league\u2019s competitive balance.<\/p>\n
Golden State had just lost to Cleveland in the Finals weeks earlier. Adding Durant to a core of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green created a superteam that would go on to win two of the next three championships.<\/p>\n
Westbrook\u2019s reaction, as Waiters described was seen as genuine shock rather than anticipated betrayal. The two had been paired together since Durant was drafted second overall in 2007 and Westbrook fourth in 2008, building nearly a decade of shared playoff runs, an MVP-caliber partnership, and a Finals appearance together in 2012.<\/p>\n
The paths Westbrook and Durant took following the split have been talked about in the years since. Westbrook stayed in Oklahoma City and delivered one of the most statistically dominant individual seasons in NBA history the very next year, averaging a triple-double for the full 2016-17 campaign and winning MVP. <\/p>\n
Durant, meanwhile, won back-to-back championships and two Finals MVP awards with Golden State. He validated the move on paper even as it permanently altered how his legacy is discussed relative to players who built their success from within a single organization.<\/p>\n
The two reportedly didn\u2019t speak for an extended period following the split. The relationship only began to improve years later as both moved on to new teams and new phases of their careers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In May 2016, a 3-1 lead in the Western Conference Finals felt like a formality. The Golden State…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3786],"tags":[7,479,164,4025,4024,6,255],"class_list":["post-829785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golden-state-warriors","tag-basketball","tag-golden-state","tag-golden-state-warriors","tag-goldenstate","tag-goldenstatewarriors","tag-nba","tag-warriors"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117227787661351836","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}