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You wasn’t with him shoutin' in the gym: Kevin Durant gets loud to get motivated
Good news, Golden State Warriors fans: it looks like the premier offseason addition to your favorite squad is determined not to allow an opening-night blowout loss break his stride or slow him down. If nothing else, I think we can safely say Kevin Durant is motivated.
Like, really, really motivated.
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After getting “slapped in the face” by the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday night, the Warriors traveled to Louisiana to prepare for Friday night’s date with the New Orleans Pelicans. Alvin Gentry’s club also dropped its home opener, but the Pelicans still employ Anthony Davis, the brand of world-breaking big man who seems perfectly suited to exploit Golden State’s perilously shaky interior defense.
Eager to avoid falling to an 0-2 mark that seemed unthinkable after he decided in July to join up with a Warriors team that already featured three All-NBA talents, had just set the record for the most wins ever in the regular season, and came mere minutes away from winning a second straight NBA championship, Durant put in extra work on the court at Smoothie King Center on Thursday. While he was alone out there — outside of Warriors assistant coach Chris DeMarco, natch — from the sound of it, KD wasn’t really alone. From Anthony Slater of the Bay Area News Group:
By the time he finally made it over to the left corner, his final spot, Durant, drenched in sweat, began to yell at himself in motivation between shots: “They say you’re not hungry! I’m out here! Put in work! Stay with it!”
Durant finally finished up the workout and, on his way out of the arena, met briefly with reporters.
“Nobody in this arena right now, and that’s when you get better,” Durant said. “Nobody sees you when you’re doing this stuff right here, but luckily y’all was in here watching.”
He was asked about the motivational words he was yelling at himself.
“That’s what I say to myself when I’m working,” he said. “I hear it all the time. You hear the noise. You hear what they say about you. Everybody hears it. So it’s a little extra motivation when you hear it.”
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Durant’s certainly been one of the NBA’s most frequently discussed topics since deciding to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder and join the Warriors. The four-time NBA scoring champion and 2013-14 NBA Most Valuable Player Came in for criticism from a variety of sources who questioned his competitive fire after he chose to leave the only franchise he’d ever known — and a team that had just held a 3-1 lead over Golden State in the Western Conference finals — to join the team that knocked his squad off in pursuit of both the NBA championship and evidently the joy that eluded him during his time in Oklahoma.
Durant told reporters who heard his post-practice vocal exercises that he hasn’t sought out the critiques. In a social media-soaked environment that can make such censure tough to avoid, though, he’s decided to use it rather than ignore it, according to Ethan Sherwood Strauss of ESPN.com:
“It’s not that I read it — it’s just in the air,” he said. “You know it’s just in the atmosphere and people tell you and you hear about it. You guys ask me questions about it all the time, so obviously I know, but I’m not losing sleep on it. It’s just wood on that fire.”
On the media response to Golden State’s big debut loss, Durant said, “Obviously you hear everything. Season’s over, the team is worst team in the league, you thought it was going to be easy. It’s one game. I thought, after losing in the playoffs by 30 or beating someone by 30 in Game 1 of the playoffs and you say it’s only one game.”
Durant’s closing statement, said with laughter as he left: “It’s one game of 82 and you f—ing guys make me feel like the world’s going to end.”
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The individual components of this — a player staying late to put in extra work in an empty gym, a player using verbal prompts to motivate himself, a player turning external criticism into internal fuel — are nothing new, and nothing remarkable. The combination of them coming one game into an 82-game campaign, though, feels a bit much, and has led to some arched eyebrows.
Maybe Durant — who, for what it’s worth, was one of the few Warriors to shine on Tuesday, scoring a team-high 27 points on 11-for-18 shooting with 10 rebounds, four assists, two steals and two blocks in 37 minutes — is paying more attention to the critics and the content of their critiques than he’d let on. Maybe that’s having a bigger effect on him than he’d like.
Maybe he thinks showing just how hard he’s working will help turn the hearts of some of those who now believe him to be a villain. Maybe he thinks pinning the negative reaction to the Warriors’ opening-night nosedive on “The Media” — never KD’s favorite amorphous blob of humanity — will act as a successful bank shot, redirecting public inquiry about him and his team toward a group of people the general populace tends to view even less favorably than millionaire athletes while allowing the Warriors to double down on the “us against the world” wagon-circling that followed a recent story about the destabilizing effects of All-NBA power forward Draymond Green. Maybe it’s all of the above, or none, or somewhere in between.
Whatever the case, Durant’s clearly well aware of what folks have been saying about him and his new squad since their “Mission-Accomplished”-banner-unveiling of a season debut, and putting in the work to follow the advice of one Donald Draper. We’ll find out Friday night whether Durant and his star teammates can bounce back and show they’ve got the goods to produce actions that speak louder than words … or, at least, louder than the ones Durant shouts to himself in empty gyms.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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