Dieter Kurtenbach: Draymond and Durant just confirmed what we already knew about the Warriors

Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News

As I’ve said dozens of times before — Draymond Green has a nasty habit of never being wrong.

And while his interview with Kevin Durant that was released Wednesday was more about brand washing than conscience cleansing, truth still found a way to the surface.

Kevin Durant didn’t leave the Warriors after the 2019 season specifically because Green yelled at him in that early-season game against the Clippers.

No, if it wasn’t that moment, it would have been countless others. Durant wanted to leave — the confrontation only proved to be a good excuse for others.

But when discussing that supposedly fateful event at Staples Center during their sitdown, Green and Durant both ganged up on the Warriors organization — specifically head coach Steve Kerr and general manager Bob Myers.

And their criticisms of how the Warriors brass handled that tricky scenario are valid.

That, more than anything else, broke up the Dubs.

“It wasn’t the argument,” Durant told Green. “It was the way that everybody — Steve Kerr pretended like it didn’t happen, Bob Myers tried to discipline you and think that would put the mask over everything.”

“We needed to throw all that s— out on the table. … We tried to dance around it. The vibe between all of that just made s— weird to me.”

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it is jarring how ridiculous the entire situation was.

Because in the moment, I don’t think we properly acknowledged the Warriors organization’s steady hum of desperation amid that championship window.

The top levels of the organization tried to play off their success like it was part of a plan, that it was all orchestrated. It wasn’t. The success the Warriors found, starting with their first title in 2015, was swift and unexpected. In a short period of time, the team went from NBA laughingstock to juggernaut.

Credit to the organization for capitalizing on the moment. But let’s be honest: They were winging it.

And Green’s conversation with Durant was another reminder that despite all the billions of dollars being spent, players run the NBA. There are no caveats or reservations there — the men on the court control everything when they’re as good as Durant.

Sports teams’ CEOs want to talk about branding and “the entertainment space” — all the ways that they’re more than “just a sports team” — it’s funded because people want to see guys like Durant play basketball. They want to be near that level of greatness.

And while the Warriors on the court were truly great — the best team I think we’ll ever see — the organization was taking on the Herculean task of building a new arena in San Francisco and expanding its scope on a near-daily basis.

Can you imagine being that financially exposed and it all riding, in a way, on Draymond Green and Kevin Durant?

Talk about stress. It’s a billion-dollar tinderbox.

And that seemed to be the real problem. Amid so much success, the Warriors organization lost its way.

Instead of handling the situation like a basketball team would at any other level — handling it among themselves, putting it all out there in the open, and seeing what happened — Myers and Kerr instead went about quelling a workplace dispute like a billion-dollar company would. I’m surprised Mark from HR wasn’t in the nearly two-hour meeting Green discussed at an Oakland Airport private terminal.

The Warriors couldn’t just “see what happened” — there was too much money on the line.

Of course, the Warriors were supposed to be the team that didn’t do things like that. They were supposed to be the authentic basketball team, unsullied by such things. Durant signed with the Warriors, in part, because of that “vibe”.

So when the Dubs showed — beyond a shadow of a doubt — that they had gone fully corporate, Durant, who was already looking to exit, was gone. All there to do was play out the season.

Durant came for one thing and left because it became something else. Can you blame him?

He’s at the epicenter of all that success — he didn’t sign up for any of the nonsense that comes with it.

And if the nonsense is unavoidable, then he might as well get to call the shots around that, too.

Durant has that kind of power in Brooklyn — the kind that was never coming to him, for a litany of reasons, in the Bay.

I’m happy for him. He seems content. Green might not like being on teams without the best player on the planet, but he’s doing just fine, too. At worst, he can fall back on being an excellent interviewer.

But those guys are fine because they, at their core, love basketball. They have a million other things going on costing millions each, but they keep their eye on the prize.

The Warriors organization failed to do that. And, perhaps more than anything else, that is why the greatest team in modern basketball history is no longer together.

Categories: Sports