Kevin Durant has been facing criticism from the moment he left the Oklahoma City Thunder to sign with the Golden State Warriors last offseason. For many, Durant took the easy way out by joining a team coming off a 73-win regular season and back-to-back trips to the NBA Finals.
FS1’s Skip Bayless thinks a couple of high-profile skeptics — Paul Pierce and Doc Rivers — should look in the mirror before calling out Durant’s free-agency decision or the formation of superteams across the NBA, though. Pierce and Rivers, after all, were part of a superteam with the Boston Celtics, making their recent comments “laughably hypocritical” in Bayless’ opinion.
.@RealSkipBayless: Paul Pierce and Doc Rivers' criticism of Kevin Durant is laughably hypocritical — what was the first super team formed? pic.twitter.com/0Jf4vs91WK
— The Facility (@TheFacilityFS1) May 31, 2017
Of course, the whole argument in many ways is apples to oranges. Durant signed with a stacked team that had just beat his Thunder in the Western Conference finals, whereas Pierce and Rivers (a player and a coach, respectively) welcomed Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to Boston via two separate trades after going 24-58. The end result for Boston was a superteam that won an NBA title in 2008 and returned to the Finals two years later, but it hardly was constructed in a similar manner.
We also might be putting too much emphasis on the recent comments made by Pierce and Rivers. Both drew from their personal experiences and pointed out how hard it would be to join a rival — as Durant did with Golden State — but neither necessarily ripped the eight-time All-Star.
