Kevin Durant compared the 76ers to his own Warriors dynasty on August 1st, and the version of history he’s selling requires forgetting that his team actually won the whole thing while this Sixers roster hasn’t played a single game together. Durant told reporters that “the last time they put three 20-point scorers on a team, they said it was unfair, which was the team I was on. They got four 25-point scorers,” pointing at Philadelphia like it’s already a finished product.
It is not a finished product. Joel Embiid, Jaylen Brown, and whoever else Philadelphia is trotting out this fall have combined for zero minutes as teammates, let alone a ring.
That gap between roster and résumé is what makes Durant’s next move so strange. He didn’t stop at hyping the Sixers — he went through his old Warriors teammates one by one in an Instagram exchange and shrunk them down to a stat line: “Joel, MVP recently. Jaylen Brown, recent Finals MVP… Klay Thompson, never a MVP candidate in nothing, 22 [points per game].”
Klay Thompson clapped back at Durant within three days, and he did it the way you rip on a guy in a group chat instead of the way you respond to a real insult. On his Instagram Story, Klay tagged Durant directly: “Aye man, u good? What u using my full government for?”
That’s the whole bit.
Durant used Klay’s full government name, not “Klay,” not a nickname, the entire “Klay Thompson,” while Embiid stayed “Joel” and Brown stayed on a first-name-adjacent basis the whole time. You don’t get formal with somebody you actually respect.
Draymond Green piled on too, cracking on Threads that Durant “thought he was on his burner” when he fired off the comments.
He was not on his burner. Durant, a Houston Rocket now, posted all of this from his real account under his real name, and Klay, grinding it out for the Mavericks these days, still got the better end of the exchange.
Durant’s actual championship run deserves better than the footnote treatment he’s giving it. Golden State went 67-15 that regular season, then ran through the 2016-17 playoffs at 16-1, the best postseason record in NBA history at that point. Durant beat Cleveland in the Finals and took home Finals MVP, averaging 35.2 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 5.4 assists in that series.
That 73-9 number people keep throwing around belongs to a different team entirely. It’s the Warriors squad from the year before Durant arrived, the one that lost the Finals to Cleveland and then went and signed him that July because it needed a proven, already-elite roster to finish the job.
Durant didn’t join a rebuild. He joined a finished product and made it better, which is precisely the instinct he’s applying to the 76ers right now.
Stack proven, established stars onto a roster and call it destiny — that’s the exact move that put him in a Warriors uniform in the first place, dressed up this time as an insult toward the guys who actually won with him.
None of this means Philadelphia’s roster is bad. Embiid at full health is still an MVP-level problem for anybody, and Jaylen Brown has a Finals MVP on his résumé nobody can take away, so Durant isn’t wrong that the talent is real.
He’s wrong about what talent alone gets you. SI’s own read on the situation called Durant’s framing “strange and wrong” for exactly that reason: peak Steph Curry was a top-three player on the planet, and nobody in Philadelphia has proven they’re that yet.
This isn’t even Durant’s first bridge-burning moment of the summer, either — it fits right alongside Durant’s other recent takes on his own legacy, and it makes Klay’s Warriors reunion talk from earlier this year look almost prophetic.
https://x.com/Ballislife/status/2084596328558899408
Klay didn’t even need three sentences to win this one.
