Kevin Durant claims he hasn’t watched last few NBA Finals despite proof to contrary

Kevin Durant created a small controversy when he said it was “100 percent false” Draymond Green called him after the Warriors lost Game 7 to the Cavaliers in last year’s NBA Finals – a claim made by Green himself. As Kurt Helin laid out, maybe one of them just misremembers the details of a single phone call a year ago. After all, Green, as he tells it, called Durant “a million times.”

But just before creating that discrepancy, Durant made a more clearly untrue claim in an exchange with Dave McMenamin of ESPN:

• McMenamin: “Last year in the Finals, as a viewer, do you recall when the series went 3-1? What was going through your mind? Did you feel like Cleveland was still in the series? And what was your impression as the comeback unfolded?”
• Durant: “I didn’t watch it.”
• McMenamin: “You didn’t watch any of the Finals? Do you normally do that, not watch the Finals?”
• Durant: “Yup. If I’m not in them, I don’t watch them.”
• McMenamin: “So you’ve only watched 2012 and this year?”
• Durant: “Well, I mean, before then, I was on teams that, we weren’t contenders. So, it’s a little different when you’re a contender, I guess. But I didn’t watch. But you kind of know the pulse of the game, a team being up 3-1. Obviously, if you’re up 3-1 in a series, as a fan – and you’re coming home – you feel as though that the away team got to have a spectacular game in order for you to win. So, last year, I didn’t put it past Cleveland to have a rest of a spectacular series. And that’s what they did.”

Here’s Durant explaining in October why he signed with Golden State, via Anthony Slater of The Mercury News (emphasis mine):

“I was telling one of my friends, Rich (Kleiman, his agent), who’s here, we were watching Game 7. Well, as it started to unfold, it was, ‘No question, no way could you go to this team.’ And I was just like a kid, like, in a candy shop. I’d get wide open 3s, I could just run up and down the court, get wide open layups. I was basically begging him. I was like, yo, this would be nice. So as I was thinking about my decision and who I was gonna play for, this team came to mind. You know, as they lost, it became more and more real every day. You start to think about it even more. To see if I would fit. Then once I sat down with these guys, everything that I wanted to know about them they kinda showed me. But we don’t have to talk about it though because they didn’t get the job done and they came after me and who knows what would’ve happened. But I guess you could say I’m glad that they lost.”

Here’s video – from Durant own documentary, starting at 11:10 mark – showing him watching the Spurs-Heat Finals in 2014, when his Thunder lost in the Western Conference finals (hat tip: reddit user xgobez):

I don’t know why Durant would claim he didn’t watch the last few NBA Finals when that is so clearly untrue. A guess: He didn’t want to discuss the Warriors blowing a 3-1 lead, and – being so locked in – he came up with a tactic to end the discussion without realizing how poorly it’d reflect on him.