It took awhile for the truth to come out on this one.
After LeBron James made is decision to leave the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat back in 2010, shockwaves were sent around the NBA. Everyone had a take, even Kevin Durant.
Durant famously sent out this tweet after The Decision and you couldn’t convince anyone it wasn’t in reference to LeBron.
Amazingly, Durant claims the tweet was actually about Penny Hardaway.
During his appearance on Bill Simmons’ podcast this week, KD had this to say:
Let me clear this up, because a lot of people talk to me about (it and say) I took a shot at him on Twitter. If you go back and look at when I posted that, I posted that later in the month, you want to know why?
Penny Hardaway came out and said, ‘I would love to play for the Heat, I think I could help them win the championship.’ And I’m like, ‘Come on, Penny. You’ve been out of the game. I played against you my rookie year, it’s like three years later, man. What are you doing?’ But it was a fake article. So I tweeted that. And now everybody’s like, ‘Well, you was criticizing LeBron.’ I signed an extension right after LeBron decided to go to Miami and a lot of people asked me about that, I said, ‘Cool, for (the Heat). We play them three times, I can’t wait to play them, it’s going to be cool.’
I didn’t criticize him, I was criticizing Penny Hardaway in this fake article I read. So a lot of people took that and ran with it.
This is kind of hard to believe but Durant was pretty adamant about it. It’s unclear why he never cleared the air earlier about this since it did garner some attention.
Durant of course can’t critique LeBron’s initial decision now, since he did a very similar thing this summer.