Kevin Durant is playing the “blame KD” hashtag card on social media after Suns owner Mat Ishbia went on CNBC and said, “bringing in super talented players like Kevin Durant doesn’t necessarily lead to championships.” There was a bit more context to Ishbia’s comments, which we’ll get to, but Durant took offense to the headline and, predictably, fired back at Ishbia.
Durant: #blameKD even though KD stayed on top of his game at 36 and got u back this “culture” you love so much. Aye, Matthew acts like I got arrested for a DUI or sumn. Back to threads 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Ishbia: You obviously didn’t watch the clip. 😂 Didn’t blame you @Kdtrey5, but am happy with the culture we are building here in Phoenix. We got the right guys and right focus now and are excited for this season. … Good luck this season in Houston.
Durant: U should be giving Thanks every chance u get. You don’t have to pay me an absurd amount of money to play for another team.
So let’s address this one comment at a time, beginning with Ishbia’s original answer, in its entirety, when he was asked on CNBC what, with the benefit of hindsight, he had learned from the trade his Suns made for Durant two days after his purchase of the team became official in February of 2023.
Ishbia’s full comments
“The team was I think the (No.) 8 or 9 seed (in the Western Conference) when I bought the team,” Ishbia said. “We had some good young players, and (the question was): Can we get over the top? I basically was told, ‘Hey, as an owner, stay out of it. Give them some money. And so I said, ‘Hey listen, we’ll go into the luxury tax, go do whatever it takes to try to win a championship.
“And so, we did that,” Ishbia continued. “But it was more going and getting Kevin Durant. Which … good player, done a lot of great things, won two championships before, but it was not aligned with my vision. We had a couple years and it did not succeed, as we’re well aware of at this point.
“After that year, I decided (to) trade Kevin Durant, bring in my (own) GM (Brian Gregory replaced James Jones), bring in a new coach (Jordan Ott replaced Mike Budenholzer, who had replaced Frank Vogel), and get extremely involved personally with the type of guy and type of person we want in the organization, not just on the court but off the court.
“I’m not saying (that type of person is) Kevin Durant or not Kevin Durant, but here’s what I will say: It is Dillon Brooks. It is Jordan Goodwin. It is Collin Gillespie. Of course Devin Booker. I’m not going to name every one of my players, but we’ve defined what matters to us. We have a thing called Suns DNA. The type of player that we believe in, that we want, and it’s a team that the fans will be proud of.
“Everyone thought we were going to be the worst team in the league last year. We made the playoffs. Won 45 games. We’re going to build on that. So what I’ve learned, my biggest lesson … it’s not positive or negative about Kevin Durant. We have to define what we’re about in Phoenix, and then stick with it. And believe in our vision and our path. And I didn’t do that in the beginning. I kind of just threw money at the problem.
“… There was not a defined culture and North Star where we were going (as an organization),” Ishbia concluded. “And therefore, bringing in super-talented players like Kevin Durant doesn’t necessarily lead to championships.”
Does Ishbia have a point?
Of course he does. In fact, he didn’t even really need the “necessarily” qualification. Unless we’re talking about the Warriors (who had Stephen Curry, and, by extension, the sort of foundational championship culture to which Ishbia is referring, and were therefore an exception to this rule), bringing in Durant has definitively not led to championships — or frankly even honest championship contention. Not for the Nets. Not for the Suns. And so far, not for the Rockets.
That’s not the dig on Durant that it sounds like. Throughout NBA history, there are very few examples of a team without an incumbent championship superstar winning a ring by way of a hired hand. The 2016 Cavaliers and 2020 Lakers did it with LeBron James, who’s the ultimate exception to this rule. He wins everywhere he goes. It’s one of the brightest feathers in his GOAT-case cap.
Other than that, you’ve got Kawhi Leonard in Toronto, Jalen Brunson in New York, and Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen with the 2008 Celtics as the only examples this century. It just doesn’t often happen that a mercenary superstar parachutes into an organization and delivers a title, and certainly not right away. Brunson needed four years and a slew of significant roster moves around him to make it happen with the Knicks.
Because Ishbia is right. You generally need an established culture with the right support system, from the role players to the coaches and the front office, in place first. Doing it the other way around is like trying to build a skyscraper on a crap foundation, and we’ve seen such structures fail over and over. James Harden with, well, every team he’s ever gone to after Houston, including Durant’s Nets, is the perfect example.
All of which is to say, when Ishbia says “bringing in super-talented players like Kevin Durant doesn’t necessarily lead to championships,” he’s just telling the truth. It’s pretty convenient, now that we all know how it turned out, that he’s saying he never wanted to go the Durant route in the first place, but nonetheless, he’s admitting that he messed up in trying to microwave the Suns like an overnight fantasy team.
You can’t do that these days. Especially with the way the aprons are restricting expensive roster building moving forward. There’s a reason we don’t see teams depleting their rosters — as the Suns did in offloading the likes of Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Chris Paul, Jae Crowder and Deandre Ayton from their 2021 Finals team — just to service their superstar fetishes anymore.
All Ishbia is saying is he has learned from his own mistakes how important roster depth, coaching and culture are to a championship pursuit, and that even an all-time talent like Durant isn’t enough to overcome the absence of those organizational elements.
Does Durant have a point, too?
In this case, not really. He’s right that he “stayed on top of his game at 36” and was individually spectacular in his two and a half seasons with the Suns, as he has been for his entire career, but Ishbia never attacked his personal performance. In fact, he never really personally attacked Durant at all, although you can understand the offense a Hall of Famer would take to being painted as a player with less “Suns DNA,” which is code for winning DNA, than Brooks and Gillespie.
But the bottom line is the Suns, with guys like Brooks and Gillespie playing their ass off every single night, were a better team last year without Durant than they were with him the year prior when they won 36 games and missed the playoffs.
Frankly, it’s almost baffling that Durant could say with a straight face that he brought the culture back to Ishbia and the Suns. In the two and a half seasons before Durant arrived, the Suns were a model franchise that had made the Finals, finished as the West’s No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in consecutive seasons, and won nearly 70% of their regular-season games. In the two and a half years with Durant, they lost nearly half their regular-season games, and in the two full seasons they had him, they got swept in the first round and missed the playoffs entirely.
That’s not to say any of that was Durant’s fault, at least in the sense that he was always individually excellent on the court. Reasonable minds can disagree as to the additive power of Durant’s particular basketball brand (it’s a question of how much he raises the level of those around him), but never his own production. It’s just impossible to compete for championships without all your organizational I’s dotted and T’s crossed.
That’s the lesson Ishbia is saying he has learned. That you can’t win by “throwing money” at your problems. It probably applies more to the Bradley Beal disaster than the trade for Durant, but the general point is the same. You have to fix these problems from the inside out, and the simple truth is that Durant has been parachuting in from the outside trying to save dying teams since he left Golden State. Almost nobody succeeds in that mission. Not even one of the 10-15 greatest players to ever live, as many, including myself, believe Durant to be.