Kevin Durant Made No Sense While Denying A Report About Him And Draymond Green

One day before Game 4 of the NBA Finals, ESPN’s Zach Lowe published an article about how the Golden State Warriors moved on from blowing a 3-1 lead in last year’s Finals. The piece specifically focused on Draymond Green’s Game 5 suspension and how the Warriors chose to stand behind Green rather than blame him for blowing the series. It included this scene:

Green was already working on that as he left Oracle Arena after that gutting Game 7 loss. Green sat in his car in the parking lot and called Myers, telling him he had to sign Durant. “It’s on you,” Green told Myers.

Green hung up, stayed in the parking lot, and made another call — to Durant. “That was my very next call,” Green said. Two weeks later, Durant signed a maximum contract that put him in a Golden State uniform for at least one season, with several more seasons likely to come.

Green was quoted throughout the article, and the anecdote about him calling Durant right after Game 7 was relayed from Green directly to Lowe. So long as we accept the fact that Lowe is not a world-historic fabulist, the veracity of this story is airtight. It was a little weird then to see Durant claim that the story is “100 percent false” after Game 5:

It’s likely that Durant had no idea that Green was quoted directly in Lowe’s story, and so he probably thought he was refuting a piece of information that came from unnamed sources. Ultimately, this doesn’t matter much—it’s not like Durant is going to be punished for lying to the press during his press conference—but it’s a good thing to remember the next time Durant tries to deny something that’s been reported about him, because there’s a decent chance he’ll be lying then as well.

[ ESPN]