Kevin Durant's Last Stand

“Everyone is excited to play with him,” Rockets big man Alperen Şengün, Houston’s only All-Star last season, said in an interview in his native Türkiye in July after joining up with his national team in advance of the EuroBasket tournament.

“It doesn’t matter his age,” Şengün added. “Ultimately, he’s Kevin Durant.”

Even at 37? Even entering his 18th NBA season?

Consider the reaction to the trade from former Rockers guard Jalen Green, who was the centerpiece of the return package Phoenix ultimately accepted for the two-time NBA Finals MVP.

“Listen,” Green wrote in a first-person piece for The Players Tribune, “nobody likes to get traded. But I can honestly say that I get it, bro.

“This is a business,” Green continued. “And if I was up there in the executive chair, I probably would’ve made the deal, too.”

Kevin Durant 2024-25 stats

As unexpectedly glowing as Green’s endorsement was of the trade that made him an ex-Rocket, it wasn’t always a slam dunk for the executive who actually did the deal. For months behind the scenes, Rockets general manager Rafael Stone repeatedly downplayed the idea of pursuing Durant. Almost from the moment that Houston acquired control of multiple future first-round picks belonging to Phoenix via a June 2024 trade with the Brooklyn Nets, Stone and other Rockets officials attempted to convince the outside world that Houston did not specifically target all those Suns first-rounders to coerce Phoenix into shipping Durant to the land of NASA to try to get some of that draft capital back.

The Rockets firmly pledged early last season — and again at the February trade deadline — that they would not make a major in-season deal. The frequently whispered justification for that stance: Houston had timeline concerns about neatly slotting Durant into the core of its franchise with so many prospects on the roster who are 25 or younger. Even going into the playoffs, with the Rockets holding the West’s No. 2 seed but widely expected to struggle against the more seasoned No. 7 Warriors, team officials were adamant that they wanted to let the twosome of Şengün and Green — flanked by the likes of Jabari Smith Jr., Tari Eason and the rising defensive menace Amen Thompson — continue to blossom.

Then the series played out in myriad painful ways. The Rockets lost Game 7 at home. Green struggled mightily, apart from a 38-point eruption in Game 2. The Rockets seemed to be crying out for a proven scorer like Durant.

What also changed: After initially exploring the Durant trade landscape in February before Durant himself urged team officials to let him finish out the season in the desert, Phoenix made the decision in June that it was time to cut ties — even as the Suns knew they would not be able to bring back anywhere near as much in terms of trade assets as they had surrendered to the Nets to acquire Durant in February 2023.

The Suns’ determination to move Durant, buy out Bradley Beal and essentially start over by building a new team around Phoenix lifer Devin Booker brought the Durant trade price point to a level that Houston couldn’t resist. The Rockets were comfortable surrendering Green and veteran swingman Dillon Brooks, with players like Thompson and Eason poised to seize the minutes Brooks left behind. Houston was also able to get Durant without allowing Phoenix to reclaim its unprotected first-round picks in 2027 and ’29. All the Rockets had to relinquish in addition to Green and Brooks was the Suns’ first-round pick in June, which landed at No. 10 overall; they also sent Phoenix a 2026 second-round draft pick and a 2032 second-round pick. For a team in win-now mode, Houston can credibly claim that it pilfered one of the sport’s all-time greats from Phoenix at a very reasonable cost.

“He’s Kevin Durant,” Stone said in early July after the trade was formally consummated. “He’s just … he’s really good. He’s super efficient. He had a great year last year. He’s obviously not 30 anymore, but he hasn’t really fallen off, and we just think he has a chance to really be impactful for us.”

It certainly didn’t hurt the deal’s chances that two key figures in the Rockets’ organization — head coach Ime Udoka and assistant coach Royal Ivey — are two of the foremost Durant fans on Earth.

Udoka has been said to be eager to coach Durant since he was in Boston — back when there were rumblings that the Celtics might even be willing to part with future NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown to acquire the future Hall of Famer. Then Ivey, also in June, committed to staying with the Rockets even though the San Antonio Spurs made a determined push to hire him away from Houston to serve as an assistant on Mitch Johnson’s first coaching staff. Ivey also interviewed for the Suns’ head coaching vacancy that ultimately went to Jordan Ott, but when he remained in Houston, it was interpreted by some in league circles that Durant was indeed on his way.

The question now, of course, is what sort of player the Rockets are getting. Durant has won four scoring titles and two championship rings. He is also a medical marvel: Since sustaining a torn Achilles in the 2019 NBA Finals and missing the entire 2019-20 season, Durant has averaged nearly 28 points and seven rebounds per game. He has also averaged better than five assists per game in that span while flirting with 50/40/90 shooting throughout his past five seasons post-Achilles tear.

The NBA has never seen another Achilles patient like him.

Kevin Durant career stats

Yet it’s also true that Durant hasn’t enjoyed a single playoff victory over the past two seasons. It would be wholly unfair to foist all the blame for the Suns’ many disappointments on him, but the two-season experiment that brought Beal in as the third wheel to Durant and Booker will unavoidably be recorded as an utter failure.

And that led one season rival executive to tell Athlon Sports: “He’s one of the greatest players we’ve ever seen, but I’m just not sure he can drive winning like he used to.”

In late February, after he successfully convinced the Suns not to trade him, Durant made a surprise appearance on the podcast that his former Warriors teammate Draymond Green co-hosts with Baron Davis. Durant was asked if he was hoping to play out his career as a Sun.

“I want my career to end on my terms,” Durant countered. “That’s the only thing.”

If you spend any time following Durant on social media, you understand just how serious he is about that aim. Six weeks into his Rockets career, Durant had not yet been made available to the Houston media, but he could been seen and heard frequently throughout the summer, jousting with fans on X unlike any NBA superstar that #thisleague has ever known.

During a days-long stretch in August, Durant was particularly outspoken in engaging critical fans on X. The back-and-forth started when a Los Angeles-based podcaster (@DimeDropperPod) asserted that Durant was not the scoring savant that he is reputed to be.

“30K points on low fga,” Durant wrote. “Ima coaches dream. Dime dropper, I mastered scoring at 24 years old. Give it a rest. I don’t care about being the best scorer ever. You are diminishing my all time greatness calling me that.”

For the next few days, Durant continued to go back and forth with various readers and dissenters, many of them openly in disbelief that Durant was so willing to participate in such extended dialogue.

In response to suggestions that he is so active on X because he’s insecure, Durant wrote: “Because I do my own PR? Don’t you present your résumé to people when they question your work?”

In response to the notion that he betrayed the Thunder by leaving them in the summer of 2016 to join the Golden State team that had just beaten Oklahoma City in the Western Conference finals: “OK cool. You feel how u feel and ill feel how I feel. There’s no harm in that.”

In response to suggestions that the NBA scheduled Houston as Oklahoma City’s Ring Night opponent to satiate the media’s desire for drama: “No, they know FANS will eat this up.”

Yup. His terms, indeed.

Most crucially, Durant got the destination he wanted in the end for what is widely presumed to be his final stop. The Rockets will be his fifth NBA team rather than, say, Minnesota. The Timberwolves indeed explored the feasibility of trading for him themselves to team Durant with his former Olympic teammate and longtime KD fan Anthony Edwards, but they backed off in large part because they knew Durant didn’t want to be there. They knew he wanted to be a Rocket.

And he certainly seems intent on going out on his own terms. Which in the offseason translates to unapologetically sharing whatever is on his mind. No one will ever be able to assert that we didn’t know what Durant was thinking.

Explaining why he chooses to be so present online, Durant wrote: “I get nothing but lashes for this but it’s entertainment for some people so I provide that service for them. Think of it like Dave Chapelle or any comedian you like [who] just goes to a comedy club and test[s] out his jokes unexpectedly. Some people feel offended by the jokes, but some understand the setting.”

When a few fans predictably pushed back on Durant’s perceived temerity to put his social media musings in the same sentence as a comedian as accomplished as Chapelle, he doubled down.

“I truly believe if I locked in,” he wrote, “I could do anything.”