MartinToVaught wrote:MoreyWins wrote:Dr Positivity wrote:I feel like wherever we have Durant on ATL we should drop him like 5 spots. He is one of the biggest cancers in top 30.
He's had some crazy unfortunate luck since leaving Golden State. As far as situations outside his control you can point to: Kyrie, COVID-19 mandates, Harden's extension, injuries, Ben Simmons, the botched summer of 2023 for Phoenix, and now the lingering effects of being a capped out team with an unmovable contract and next to no assets.
Kyrie was definitely not "bad luck" or outside of Durant's control. He chose to team up with a player who, at the time, was probably the most selfish and toxic diva in sports, who quit on a championship/perennial Finals team for the sake of his own ego and had just set the Celtics back several years. He blithely ignored all the glaring red flags with Kyrie and his own lack of any leadership abilities made things worse.
Listing COVID mandates is also a reach when everyone had to play under them. Again, he chose to play with the one diva in the NBA who felt he was above the rules. Some of the other stuff (like being stuck with Ben) is also downstream from his choice to play with Kyrie.
He's less to blame for the mess in Phoenix, but even then, a big reason why they're so screwed right now is because of how much they traded for him. And he's still demonstrating zero leadership ability. He doesn't appear to give a crap about winning anymore and that attitude has also rubbed off on Booker.
I don’t think it’s fair to say “He chose to play with Kyrie” as a way to justify an assertion that Durant himself is a team cancer. There’s definitely a difference between being a cancer yourself and choosing to be on a team with someone who is a cancer. The latter may arguably be bad decision-making, but it is not actually being a team cancer yourself.
All that said, I do think that there’s definitely meaningful circumstantial evidence that Durant himself tends to be a negative for team chemistry.
