When Kevin Durant announced he was joining the Golden State Warriors, he left an enormous, MVP-shaped hole in the state of Oklahoma. On Wednesday, I talked with Oklahoman sports columnist (and lifelong Oklahoman) Berry Tramel about Durant’s decision to leave the Thunder. Among the topics we discussed: how Oklahoma City fans feel about their former hero, the difference between Durant and Russell Westbrook, and how Durant responded to the Tramel column that was headlined “Mr. Unreliable.” (Tramel didn’t write the headline, which the newspaper later apologized for.) The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Josh Levin: Sitting here a long way away from Oklahoma, I didn’t think there was any way Kevin Durant was going to leave. I didn’t believe it until I saw the announcement, and even then I kind of didn’t believe it. What was the sense in Oklahoma City? Were people thinking this was going to happen, or was it a total shock?
Berry Tramel: It was somewhere between stunned and shocked. Disbelief—all those things. The fact that it happened late morning of the Fourth of July, when nobody is working and everybody is milling about in some sort of recreational mode, everything just sort of stopped. I was in my neighborhood’s Fourth of July parade. My wife and I organize it every year. We had just finished the parade, kind of mingling around, all of a sudden it came on the phones: Durant to the Warriors. So yeah, it brought the Fourth of July to a halt.
He was always so generous and, it seemed, genuine about his affection for the state and for the city and for the fans, so I’d imagine that made it even more surprising.
Yeah, I don’t know if he fooled us. It might have been legit. But clearly we didn’t put enough stock in two things. No. 1, the PR power of both the NBA and the Thunder. I think they schooled him well: what to say, how to say it, what to do. I’m not saying it wasn’t genuine, I’m just saying he was really good at the PR side. We also didn’t really appreciate how much influence the people around him had. Whereas Russell Westbrook really doesn’t have an entourage—he’s had the same agent since he declared out of UCLA eight years ago—Durant’s not that way. He’s changed agents two or three times, he’s got a business manager really in his ear, he’s got his family much more involved in expressing themselves. It became clear to me in the last few days that those people were pushing Durant to make a change. I don’t think it’s anything against Oklahoma City. I think there’s just a bias for change. When you’re dealing with money, doing something different is always impactful. I think those things conspired to produce the advice that he ought to move. No. 2, of course, would be the championship possibilities. I think he believed he could win one in Oklahoma City, but I think he came to believe that it was going to be much more of an opportunity at Golden State. I think that’s what happened. I think the feelings and the things he said about Oklahoma City were genuine, but I don’t know that they were to the extent that we wanted to believe.
There are two possible ways to think about this. The first is that Oklahoma City and the Thunder just had this horrible run of bad luck. I don’t know if you want to go back to the decision to trade James Harden, which wasn’t so much luck as a choice that was made. But when you look at injuries, the bounces of the ball in the Western Conference Finals against the Warriors, and then after that the Warriors losing in the Finals—it seems all of these preconditions were met for Durant to leave, and it was just threading the eye of a needle. On the other side you could say, well, maybe Durant just wanted to go, and if it hadn’t been the Warriors, it would have been someone else.
Clearly, the change in the salary cap—the explosion of the cap from $70 million to $94 million, which made the suitors go from about four or five to 29. Literally everybody had a chance to get Kevin Durant. That changed everything. If it comes down to Boston or the Thunder, the Thunder’s got a lot better chance. But Golden State clearly offers a great opportunity to get together with so many great players and play a unique style. What comes into play for the handlers that I mentioned, I don’t know. I don’t know if Boston would appeal to Durant in any major basketball way more than Oklahoma City. If there was no Golden State option, would they have wanted him to go to Boston or Miami or Los Angeles just for the sake of change? I tend to think not, but I don’t know for sure. I just refuse to believe some of the revisionist history, like the dissatisfaction with Russell Westbrook, with the style of offense. I think Oklahoma City would have a much better chance to keep him if not for the salary cap changing in such a profound way.
Why don’t you buy the stuff about Westbrook and the offense? Westbrook is fantastic, but it seems like on the court it could be frustrating to play with him.
Here’s my problem. It might be true. Durant might be frustrated with Westbrook. To me, it’s low-rent to plant that story after you leave and shift some of this to Russell Westbrook. You got a problem with Westbrook, get that story out in 2013, get it out in 2015, don’t wait until you leave town and then let somebody believe this is really Russell Westbrook’s fault. Sure, there are crazy things about Westbrook. Sure, their style of play can be dissected. But they won a ton of games, and they had a shot at championships, and if you look at the best tandem of basketball in terms of assists to a specific scorer, Russell Westbrook to Kevin Durant has been the best in the league for many years. So to me, I thought that was unfair, and that really disappointed me more than anything, for that story to get out and put this on Russell Westbrook.
Can you give me a sense of Durant’s presence around town, both in terms of him being a figure in Oklahoma City and of the shadow he cast in the city? How towering of a figure was he?
He was not much of a figure in most people’s day-to-day lives. You weren’t running into him around town. He did a lot of late-night hanging around in the Deep Deuce district, which is a trendy area right off downtown, so you’d run into him at night spots and everything. From what I understand he was pretty cool with it, and people were pretty cool with him. The symbolic presence that he had in the town was much bigger. Just the idea that an international superstar in Oklahoma City, thriving in Oklahoma City, saying good things about Oklahoma City, doing good things for Oklahoma City. That was really new to us, it was different to us, and we reveled in the fact that we had this international superstar in our midst and he seemed to be fine—he thought it was great here. And then his demeanor through the media, through television interviews, his demeanor on the court, people just connected with it because he is a likable guy. He’s a super guy, and he’s a humble guy. I don’t know how well he has crafted that image, but I think deep down he really is pretty soft inside. So people just went nuts over that because that’s the kind of person Oklahomans like to think they are, and for their superstar to be not a villain but a lovable professional athlete was just an extra bonanza for them. I still claim he is the most popular Oklahoman since Will Rogers. It’s not even close athletically and I don’t know who he would be close with nonathletically. He unified the state. He got everybody together. People that weren’t sports fans were drawn to Kevin Durant. He was an Oklahoma icon unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
How are fans feeling about the Thunder’s chances to re-sign Westbrook?
Well, it went from massive optimism about Durant to now its massive pessimism about Westbrook. Everybody always assumed that Durant would be the one to stay and Westbrook would be the one to leave. Now they all think, well, Westbrook is out the door, too. I don’t necessarily think that is absolute or even most likely. I think the Thunder might still have a chance to keep him. But people are very pessimistic about it. Westbrook is not that kind of personality that I talked about with Durant. He is a villain in a lot of NBA circles just because of his personality, his demeanor, his media dealings. People didn’t connect with him in the way they did with Durant. However, there are things that I can appreciate about Westbrook. He came to town as a 19-year-old rookie, two months shy of his 20th birthday. He moved to town with his brother, and that was it. He didn’t have an entourage. He just came, got an apartment, and started going to work. Durant’s entourage sat courtside: Charlie Bell, his mother, his brother, friends, they have four of six seats courtside every year. Westbrook’s family or his agent or anybody was never that high profile. His brother is a little kooky and can sort of do some things but nobody takes him too seriously. Westbrook is sort of his own man. His agents aren’t going to tell him where to go. He may want to go to Los Angeles, he may want to go to Boston, I don’t know. But he is not going to be pulled in different directions. He is going to do what he wants to do. And I think that gives the Thunder a little bit of hope that they can win the sales job with him saying, Hey, all those years with Durant being the franchise cornerstone, maybe we had the wrong guy.
Does it bug you that when there is a video of a single person burning a Durant jersey then the story becomes, “people are burning Durant jerseys in OKC”?
Yeah, it’s silly. I assume the same thing happened in Cleveland, I don’t know the level of the anger in Cleveland, but the level of the anger here is not high. Most people are much more disappointed than they are angry. There is not a hatred of Kevin Durant, there are not people just cursing his name. That’s not really what’s going on. It’s more like, “I’m really disappointed. How were we fooled?” When he comes back, I think he’ll get cheered.
What is your thought about people from Seattle who are like, “Wow, I wonder what it feels like to lose something that you really care about. That must be terrible.”
Yeah, it is terrible. What I would tell them is, next time build the basketball team an arena the way you did the football team and the baseball team. That’s what I’d tell them. And next time the owner buys the team and says, “The agreement is that I’ve got a year to build an arena and then I’m free to move it,” believe it.
What’s a personal memory of Durant that will stick with you?
Oh, I thought he was really good through “Mr. Unreliable.” That was my column. I did not call him “Mr. Unreliable.” I wrote about his frustration during the Memphis series, I wrote about how he was so flummoxed by Tony Allen that he had become unreliable at the foul line, when he’d been great. Well, somehow that became “Mr. Unreliable” in the headline. He was great through all that. That could have been a bad situation for me if he had expressed outrage, but he didn’t, and he was fine. He was always pretty good with the media, but in the last year of two, he’s been fantastic—he was clearly the best in the locker room to talk to. So that I’ll miss. Westbrook isn’t going to take that role on, I promise you, so that’ll be the loss for us. Deep down, I think he’s just a pretty solid guy. We didn’t like the decision he made, but it’s his right to make it. You’re not going to get me to say a bad thing about Kevin Durant. I don’t think he is who we thought he was, but that’s our fault because we put him on a pretty high pedestal. That’s on us.
