Houston Rockets forward Kevin Durant was a recent guest at the Game Plan Sports Business Summit. During his appearance, Durant spoke about the process of being traded from the Phoenix Suns. Durant admitted to being hurt when he found out the Suns were shopping him ahead of last February’s trade deadline.
“Initially, I was a little upset because I felt like we built a solid relationship, me and the Phoenix Suns,” Durant said. “And to hear that from a different party was kind of upsetting, but that’s just the name of the game. So I got over that quickly and was trying to figure out what the next steps were.”
Durant confirmed that he and his representatives did what they could to block a trade to the Golden State Warriors at the deadline.
“I heard Golden State was in the mix around the trade deadline, but that’s when (Durant’s business partner and manager) Rich (Kleiman) came into play, and those relationships that we built around the league and also playing in Golden State helped,” Durant said. “We were able to tell them to kind of hold off on that.”
Durant said after being made available ahead of the trade deadline that he knew trade talks would pick up again when the offseason started.
“Since me being on the market in February when there’s also a trade deadline, people were just kind of seeing how their seasons played out and what they needed for their teams,” Durant said. “We knew we would revisit that right around the summertime, and Houston kind of jumped on, and it happened pretty fast from there.”