Kevin Durant isn’t holding back on his feelings about how the NBA Finals between the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors played out.
The two-time NBA Finals MVP joined Serge Ibaka‘s popular YouTube series How Hungry Are You?, where the “Mafuzzy Chef” prepares unorthodox dishes for his guests while getting them to open up about various topics.
Ibaka, who played with Durant on the Oklahoma City Thunder from 2009 to 2016, asked his former teammate whether the series would have played out differently if he’d been healthy. Durant was adamant that the Warriors would have won if that had been the case, but Ibaka wasn’t going to let him downplay Toronto’s run.
“If you put an if in front of anything, I could believe anything. So, yes!” Durant offered.
Ibaka wasn’t convinced, thought, saying the Raptors, “were like a fire, nobody could stop us.” Durant responded with, “I could have, I was like sub-zero.”
Banter aside, Durant said he liked the way Toronto played and how head coach Nick Nurse’s gameplan focused on winning each possession rather than the ‘Xs and Os.’
Ibaka was surprised to see Durant in the lineup for Game 5. After the former MVP went down on the court holding his leg, he was thinking about many different things.
“It’s crazy how quickly your mind switches, cause in the matter of the next second it was like I was on the ground thinking about my whole basketball career,” said Durant. “It happened so fast and once I got to the back and realized what happened, it was like, ‘Alright, when can I get surgery?’ I was just trying to move on to the next step so fast and try not to dwell on it too much.”
After signing with the Brooklyn Nets as a free agent, Durant does not expect to play this season as he continues to rehab his torn Achilles, but he says his timetable depends on how he progresses the next few months.
Ibaka took a moment to apologize for how some fans acted in the moment, cheering his injury as he went down, but Durant didn’t take it personally. He classified his comments from the summer — when he said the Raptors would probably never make the Finals again — as just a reaction to the loss.
“That was all jokes…classy fans up there, I understood the whole thing,” said Durant. “This is Toronto’s first time in the Finals, they treated like it was a college-like atmosphere. So I understood, no hard feelings but it was fun to take a little jab at the fans.”
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