I tried to care about the Kevin Durant trade but I just can’t do it

“KD is a snake”

I’ll never forget the image that my friend texted me from the beach he was at in Maine, just after the 4th of July in 2016. Some disgruntled basketball fan had emblazoned those words into the sand, capturing what myself and many other young basketball fans were feeling. Kevin Durant, who was at worst the third-best player in the world at the time, had signed with the 73-win Golden State Warriors, and life as we knew it was over.

But here we are in 2025, and Durant and the Houston Rockets are asking me to care again. Shams Charania’s post-draft tweet reminding all of us about the end of KD’s latest trade saga landed on my phone today the same way the original did; not like a firecracker but a meager sparkler. “Oh, cool. Anyway…” was my emotion, not some bold statement that this would change everything, or snap judgment about anyone being a legless invertebrate.

Nobody, especially not me, seems to care about this move. I got 20 times more riled up about the New Orleans Pelicans trading their 2026 unprotected first-round pick on draft night than I did about this quote-unquote superstar whose constant moves are leaving me exhausted. It’s nearly a week later, and does anyone even remember this trade happened? Come opening night, am I just going to forget Kevin Durant is on the Rockets like he’s some NFL slot receiver I notice is on the Broncos during my fantasy football draft? It’s not like 2016, not even close.

To be fair, Durant is old now, and it’s not clear his impact on winning merits anywhere near those prior levels of excitement anymore. The NBA’s second-most-infamous decision was almost nine years ago. It led to two championships and two Finals MVPs, but Durant has changed teams three times since then, most recently in a trade to the Houston Rockets. Before then, he started a basketball revolution in Brooklyn with Kyrie Irving, which may have doomed a decade of Nets basketball. By forcing his way out, he ended up in Phoenix for their entire portfolio of assets, which — along with a Bradley Beal trade — may have doomed a decade of Su… you get it.

Durant hasn’t been able to be happy on a team since his second year in Golden State, but he’s always been able to get a rise out of me. I was enraged when he went to the Warriors. I was annoyed when he wound up in Brooklyn because they’re in the Eastern Conference with my Celtics, and legitimately surprised when he got traded to Phoenix — it came out of left field. But this Houston trade? I’m over it.

Durant is still a great player, but when you switch teams roughly every two years of my entire teenage and adult life, I start to lose interest. What, this Houston situation is going to suddenly feature the happiness that Durant has been so futilely searching for? That’s what they’re trying to sell us, but until it happens, I’m not buying it.

Houston rightly talked themselves into Durant, since the asking price wasn’t crazy. This certainly raises their ceiling, and ensures there is no debate about who is taking the last shot anymore. But it’s still after almost a decade of evidence to prove that he won’t be happy; and perhaps more concerningly, five years of evidence that a Durant-led team is going nowhere.

Durant’s Nets and Suns teams have won two total playoff series, and while I won’t knock the Rockets for this, I’m just sick of pretending Durant is some fortune changer. Nothing we’ve seen in the last six years makes me think he is.