NBA – “The Spurs made the right decision to pass up on a Kevin Durant trade, and here’s why”

Par Pierre-Andréa Fraile | Journaliste sportif

While Kevin Durant was supposedly tempted by a future in San Antonio, the Spurs kindly passed on the opportunity to recruit him. A decision that surprised and even annoyed many a fan, but which, according to one journalist, is easily explained.

From an outsider’s point of view, the situation might seem rather paradoxical. For weeks, after all, the Spurs had been announced as one of Kevin Durant’s favorite landing spots. Yet Shams Charania never mentioned the Spurs among the teams best placed to obtain him. According to Hector Ledesma of ClutchPoints, the Texans were not very cooperative with the Suns:

Hector Ledesma: San Antonio had no desire to include this summer’s #2 draft pick or Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle in any deal for Durant. Reports indicate that they also had no intention of parting with any future first-round pick or winger Jeremy Sochan. Yet some continue to question whether they should have pulled the trigger or not.

Did Spurs make the right choice in the Kevin Durant case ?

The Spurs may have been skittish in the eyes of some of their fans, but they’ve actually been smart about the whole affair. At least, that’s what Ledesma suggests in an article entitled “Why the Spurs made the right decision to pass up on a Kevin Durant trade”:

Hector Ledesma: Durant’s Suns didn’t make the playoffs this season. This, despite the presence alongside him of Devin Booker, one of the league’s best players, and Bradley Beal, who nonetheless turned in 17 points per game.

With this same core of stars, the Suns had been swept out in the first round of the postseason the previous year and had been eliminated in the conference semi-finals two years earlier. All this, after reaching the Finals in 2022 and winning 64 regular-season games in the 2022-23 campaign. In other words, they weren’t as good after recruiting Durant.

Without going so far as to place all the blame for these failures on KD, Ledesma deduces that he could not have drastically accelerated the Spurs’ project:

Hector Ledesma: If the various Phoenix teams he formed with established stars failed to go far in the playoffs, would a Spurs line-up centered around a still-developing Victor Wembanyama, a newly-arrived De’Aaron Fox and a young, still raw Castle succeed? (…) The answer is probably no, which justifies this desire to focus on the future.

Therefor, the Texan franchise should stay the course for the long term and select Dylan Harper in the next few hours at the Draft.