Kevin Durant Thinks the Media has Been Mean to Kobe Bryant

Over the weekend, Kobe Bryant announced that he would be retiring at the end of this season. He did it as all the greats do: with a poem on The Players’ Tribune, an outlet at which he is both investor and editorial director. Kobe is 37 years old and now pretty much stinks at playing basketball professionally. No one has been outrageously critical of Kobe this year, but most outlets have reported the facts as they are, namely that Kobe is old and no longer good. A noted chucker, Kobe has a career shooting percentage of .450. This year he’s shooting .305, on nearly 17 shots per game.

For whatever reason, mentioning this irked Bryant’s Players’ Tribune underling Kevin Durant, and Durant criticized the media for being mean to Kobe. “You guys treated one of our legends like shit and I didn’t really like it. Hopefully now you can start being nice to him now that he decided to retire after this year. It was sad the way he was getting treated.”

I mean, lighten up KD, jeez. Kobe is a legend, no doubt—or, at least, the non-2015 Kobe is a legend—but he has, quite emphatically, not played well this year. It’s not treating Kobe like shit to say that, it’s treating him (and everyone else) like an adult. The Thunder, specifically Durant and Westbrook, have an icy relationship with their local media, so this could all just be a by-product of that distrust/animosity. But even still, this is a pretty ridiculous bone to pick.

Durant said he idolized Kobe, and it is undoubtedly hard to see your hero stagger his way across the finish line. This is maybe even more so for professional athletes, whose jobs require them to live in a sort of denial regarding their own fallibility and vulnerability to that sort of deterioration. Time catches up with everyone, even the insanely fit and athletic. It’s a bummer mostly because you only want to remember the greatness—you don’t want to associate “I freaking Suck” Kobe with Dropped-81-on-the-Raptors Kobe—but it’s also a reminder that a player’s time on top is finite. Kobe was the fresh-faced heir to Michael Jordan, and now he’s a grumpy old guy who misses 70 percent of his shots. Unless he becomes one of the very rare athletes who retire while still at his or her peak, the same thing will happen to Durant. There’s nothing mean about it. It’s just time doing what it does.