​Kevin Durant Gave a Reasonable Explanation for His 'Untouchable' Status With OKC Media

The average NBA fan's perception of Kevin Durant has changed a lot in the last year. His decision to sign with the Golden State Warriors—the team that came back from a 3-1 deficit in the Western Conference finals to eliminate Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder squad before, uh, well, you know—turned him into a pariah in Oklahoma City, and the personification of the Soft Millennial to the old guard that extols pathological competitiveness (i.e. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan) above all else. There were some media members who understood that Durant was just like an employee seeking a better job opportunity elsewhere, even if his decision to join a 73-win Warriors team mushroomed any attempts at league-wide parity. The media's perception of Durant changed a lot, too, but it wasn't simply related to his newly found Judas status among swathes of NBA fans.

Whereas Durant came off as prickly and unwilling to answer questions in Oklahoma City, he's appeared a lot more transparent and keen to talk after moving to the Bay. Some armchair analysts might chalk that up to Durant being in a better head place, or some other hooey, but the reason he gave Chris Haynes in an interview with ESPN.com on Wednesday illuminates a lot about his often icy relationship with the Oklahoma City press:

Kevin Durant: You couldn't do this? What you're doing now?

Chris Haynes: Hell nah. We definitely couldn't do this. We couldn't get within arm's length of you without somebody body-checking us.

KD: That's the protocol they had in OKC. You had to respect it. They wanted to control the story. They wanted to control the narrative around our team, and I understood that, because there's a lot of bulls--- that can seep into a young team and affect a young team. When you've got an older group of guys like this, you've been around the block, this stuff really doesn't creep in. It may creep in with a young team.

Like for example, I'm not saying this ever happened, but if you sat down and talk to Jeremy Lamb about, "All right, you're not playing. How you feel about not playing?" And he says, "I want more minutes," and the rest of the team hears that as a young group of guys, what are they going to say? It's going to be, now it's us versus Jeremy.

So you've got to look at it from that perspective. When you've got a young team, we had a bunch of 20-year-olds, 19-year-olds, you got to walk them through this life, because it's different. You guys have a job to do, and it's not to cater to the players. It's to figure out a story. You guys aren't working together. He's trying to figure out his way in the league, and he shouldn't have to be distracted about a media story.

Durant's relationship with the media was manifold in Oklahoma City. After acting as the yin to LeBron's yang following the latter's Decision 1.0 in the summer of 2010, Durant was considered a good guy in the lead-up to his MVP in 2014, but another loss in the playoffs that spring possibly changed things. He quite literally went bad in a Nike campaign that then seemed to bleed into his actual persona over his last two years with the Thunder. He glowingly referred to himself as a "dick" in a GQ article early in 2015. During All-Star weekend in New York City, Durant said the media had too much power and claimed they "don't know sh*t."

It continued the next year after complications from Jones fracture surgery kept him out of all but 27 regular-season games. Durant grew tired early in the 2016 season and complained about being treated "like a 19-year-old vet." Then, he blamed the media for overlooking the Thunder and for treating Kobe Bryant "like shit." Despite all this antipathy towards the spotlight, an unprompted Durant also said he didn't hate the media.

But the weary Durant reporters and fans saw in Oklahoma City kept the media at arm's length and cautioned his running mate to do the same because of an edict from the team. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk, just that the team didn't want him to. And it's not necessarily a bad idea if you're trying to protect a small market team with two legitimate superstars and a roster full of young guys looking for their spotlight.

The next time you curse an NBA superstar for a "no comment" when they're asked to explain their actions, remember it's probably not as simple as it might seem.