If you, an average person, decided to leave your job without providing two weeks notice, which would give the former employer the ability to adequately find a replacement, would you expect them to roll out the red carpet if you returned on a business meeting as a member of your former company’s biggest competitor?
That’s essentially the scenario Kevin Durant described in a Wall Street Journal interview last week in which he is still upset former Thunder employees were part of the cold shoulder (and then some) that fans provided on his first return trip to Oklahoma City as a member of the Golden State Warriors in 2017.
“I eventually wanted to come back to that city and be part of that community and organization, but I don’t trust nobody there,” Durant told The Wall Street Journal’s J.R. Moehringer. “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.”
Fans chanted cupcake — Russell Westbrook’s famous dig at his former teammate — and of course there were far more malicious acts perpetrated by Thunder fans. In the WSJ piece, Durant’s mother Wanda recounted a harrowing video of a Thunder fan shooting bullets into a Durant jersey. Those actions are inexcusable, but Durant wants to act as if he’s blameless in his departure from the Thunder.
He lived in Oklahoma City and donated a million dollars to the Moore tornado relief efforts, but the same thoughtfulness wasn’t there as he held the famous meetings in the Hamptons during the summer of 2016. Thunder fans showed no ill will for Westbrook this offseason as he essentially asked for a trade to another Western Conference rival — a fact Durant conveniently leaves out of his narrative.
