In his return to Brooklyn for the first time since his trade to Phoenix last season, Kevin Durant scored 33 points in the Suns' 136-120 win over the Nets, showing off the dominant and efficient scoring that made fans dream of NBA titles upon his arrival in 2019.
But the big three he formed with Kyrie Irving and James Harden that offered all that promise failed to produce a deep playoff run – getting past the opening round just once. When asked about his lack of success in Brooklyn, Durant said he looks at success in two parts: individual and the team.
“As an individual, I was an All-Star every year, leading vote-getter every year in the All-Star game, sold a lot of jerseys, 50-40-90 [field goal percentage, three-point percentage, free throw percentage], averaged 30, All-NBA. Was that successful?” he said. “But team success is a different thing. How the team does, you like to put that on one of the best players and call it a failure. But you look at the work, and you wanna talk about me individually, you can just look at the work that I’ve put in here.
“I think I’ve grown as a player, I think I’m on my way to mastering the game. Coming here helped push me closer to that, so that’s what I try to take from my time here.”
In addition to the failure in the playoffs, Brooklyn’s big three era was defined by a struggle to stay on the court. The trio managed just 16 games together over two seasons. Ironically, Wednesday marked the 17th game Durant played alongside Devin Booker and Bradley Beal in their first season as a big three for the Suns.
“That’s context for why we was a failure, right?” Durant said, putting air quotes around the world failure when a reporter mentioned that stat to him during his postgame news conference.
When asked if considers the"‘what ifs" from his time with Irving and Harden in Brooklyn, Durant was empathic: "Nah. No."
“I mean that’s just a pointless exercise, in my opinion, to think about what could've been,” Durant said. “What happened, that’s what I thought about, what actually happened in the reality of it. We didn’t have enough time together, that’s just it.
“Guys wanted to go their separate ways. We tried our hardest to salvage everything and bring everything together. We had three or four different teams from when I signed here to when I left.”
When first asked about his opportunity to reminisce about his four seasons – the first of which he missed while rehabbing from a torn Achilles – Durant said he thinks about “the work we put in every day through the adversity, through the noise.”
“The relationships being built with my teammates and the coaching staff. We had,” he said before pausing and exhaling, “a lot of different coaches and players come through here and they all understood what we were trying to fight for and so that made us tighter and closer as a group.
“And just New York City, in general. I just absolutely loved living here. I hated it before coming as a visitor, but once you move here you just build your love up for the city and understand the city even more. I had a great time here.”