It took a little over a week, but Steph Curry responded to Kevin Durant‘s comments about not feeling accepted by the Golden State Warriors.
Durant, who left the Warriors for the Brooklyn Nets after the close of the 2019 season, told Wall Street Journal Magazine that he felt like an outsider because his career didn’t start in the Bay Area like Curry’s, Draymond Green‘s and other former teammates.
“I’ll never be one of those guys. I didn’t get drafted there,” Durant explained. “As time went on, I started to realize I’m just different from the rest of the guys.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” he added. “Just my circumstances and how I came up in the league. And on top of that, the media always looked at it like KD and the Warriors. So it’s like nobody could get a full acceptance of me there.”
Curry responded in a recent interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols, and he seemed to disagree with his former teammate about not being accepted.
“I mean, that’s tough,” Curry explained. “There’s so many narratives that go on, especially when you’re at the top of the league. No matter how the full transition happens to Brooklyn, him separating himself from the Warriors, that’s gonna happen. I think he knows, you know, what we were about as teammates, what we were about as friends on and off the court.”
“And again, nobody is going to take away the accomplishments we had,” added Curry. “But at the end of the day, whatever he needed to do to make that decision and however he wants to explain that, that’s just what’s going to happen.”
Durant also criticized the Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr‘s motion offense in his interview, which is in contrast to the one-on-one type of play that he usually thrives in.
But while Curry admitted the motion offense wasn’t always effective, it got the Warriors two championships while Durant was with them.
“Well, I don’t care what plays we ran,” stated Curry. “We won two championships. And at the end of the day, we had a lot of talent and there was an expectation of us figuring out how to balance all that. And we talked a lot about it throughout the three-year run.”
“It wasn’t always perfect,” he added. “But I think in terms of the results and what we were able to do on the floor, that kind of speaks for itself. We all wanna play iso-ball at the end of the day in some way, shape or form. But I’d rather have some championships too.”
