Kevin Durant wrote a heartwarming message on X to his former Oklahoma City Thunder teammate Russell Westbrook after Westbrook announced his retirement. The two have a storied history together, making a Finals run against the Miami Heat in 2012 and sharing multiple All-Star seasons. They played eight seasons together from 2008-09 through 2015-16.
Few teammates were more important to each other during that era of Thunder basketball. How did we get to this point? How did Westbrook and Durant get back on good terms after everything that happened in 2016 and 2017? First, we have to look at the actual message.
In the post, Durant remembers asking assistant coach Mo Cheeks whether it was harder to work out before practice or after practice. Westbrook was the type to stay and work afterward, and Cheeks admitted that was the harder route. Durant used that story to explain what Westbrook was really like behind the scenes: not necessarily someone constantly talking about how hard he worked, but someone quietly putting everything into it.
Durant also remembered the bus rides, plane rides, card games, arguments, jokes, comebacks from injuries, playoff runs, the 2012 Finals and the All-Star appearances. The message was basically a reminder that their relationship was much bigger than the few years of public drama that came afterward. Durant closed by giving respect to Westbrook’s family and the people who supported him throughout his career.
Can we really get to this point without one critical moment?
In one of the most shocking free-agent decisions of the 2010s, Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City in 2016 and joined the Golden State Warriors. The same Warriors the Thunder had just blown a 3-1 Western Conference Finals lead against.
The backlash was massive. Golden State had just gone 73-9, and Durant had spent eight seasons playing beside Westbrook without winning a championship. Wanting a better chance at a ring made sense from Durant’s perspective. Joining the team that had just eliminated Oklahoma City made him NBA public enemy No. 1 almost overnight.
Westbrook’s side made the situation even messier. Westbrook later said he found out about Durant leaving “like y’all found out,” meaning basically at the same time the public did. Other reports said Durant sent him a goodbye text. Either way, there was clearly no clean sit-down conversation between two players who had spent eight years together.
That is where the media narrative really took off.
The strange part is that the beef did not last nearly as long privately as it seemed to publicly.
Kendrick Perkins, their former Thunder teammate, played a major role in getting the two talking again. After Westbrook broke Oscar Robertson’s single-season triple-double record in April 2017, Perkins texted Durant. According to Perkins, Durant later told him that he and Westbrook had finally had a good conversation and were back on speaking terms.
That means the relationship was already starting to heal while fans were still treating every Warriors-Thunder game like some personal war.
Perkins basically became the middleman.
Publicly, Durant was still being booed in Oklahoma City, Westbrook was still being asked about him constantly, and every stare or hard foul became a headline. Privately, the two had already started settling their differences.
The Durant-Westbrook breakup was real. Westbrook was hurt by the way Durant left, and Durant himself acknowledged that the relationship would probably never be exactly the same afterward.
But the idea that the two hated each other forever was mostly a much cleaner story for television than reality.
Eight years of practices, playoff runs, Finals appearances, injuries and growing up together in the league do not disappear because of one free-agency decision. Westbrook even said at the time that eight years together was not something that could simply be thrown away.
That makes Durant’s retirement message feel less like some sudden reconciliation and more like the final public confirmation of something that had been repaired years ago.
The media may have painted Kevin Durant as the NBA’s most wanted man in 2016 and turned the Westbrook relationship into one of the biggest beefs in basketball, but the reality was more complicated.
Westbrook had every reason to feel betrayed, especially after finding out about Durant’s decision the way he did. Durant had spent almost a decade in Oklahoma City without a championship and believed Golden State gave him the best chance to win.
Somewhere between all of that, Kendrick Perkins helped get them talking again.
Durant’s message to Westbrook now shows what was always underneath the drama: eight seasons of history, respect and memories that one ugly breakup was never going to completely erase.
Sometimes the coverage lasts longer than the beef itself.
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