Stephen A. Smith shared three spicy Kevin Durant reports on Wednesday’s episode of First Take. The least spicy of the three (since it’s three years old, now) had Durant, entering unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2016, telling several Thunder teammates to their faces that he would not be leaving Oklahoma City, exactly one day before meeting with a delegation of Warriors and making the jump to Golden State. The spiciest report from Smith—and the one that’s more relevant to Durant’s decision to dump the Warriors for Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets this summer—is that Durant “wasn’t too fond of Steve Kerr at all.” Kerr is the head coach of the Golden State Warriors—you can see how this might’ve affected Durant’s choices in free agency.
Smith’s medium-spiced Durant report, and certainly the funniest of the three, came later in the episode, when he reported the breaking news that Kevin Durant says Stephen A. Smith’s reporting on Kevin Durant is bullshit.
Both of Smith’s non-Smith reports from Wednesday sound very much like they could be true. They are also generally unflattering to Durant, which would give Durant another possible incentive for shooting them down, beyond that they might be false. Triangulating the truth here will mean comparing the credibility of a self-aggrandizing rumormonger to that of an online-brained cheesebutt superstar who defends himself via phony social media profiles. Good luck with that.