Some people feel that Kevin Durant’s sneak-dissing of his former Thunder teammates and coach through the apparent attempted use of a dummy Twitter account to argue with Twitter randos shows Durant’s humanity, his normalcy, his relatability. Others, like former NBA star Stephen Jackson, have correctly diagnosed this behavior as profoundly lame, as Jackson explained on ESPN’s The Jump yesterday:
Here’s a transcript of the crux of Jackson’s tough but fair take:
Ah, Kevin Durant. I look at you now as I look at everyone else on Twitter and Instagram that has a little egg avatar. You are that person now. You cannot be excluded from that. Who creates a fake page? I’m the person, if I want to respond to somebody on social media, it has to come from my page with a verified check on it. He’s an egg avatar now, I have no respect for him.
The Jump host Rachel Nichols pushed back on Jackson’s opinion a little by claiming Durant deserves props for allegedly “owning” his behavior, alluding to Durant’s public apology from Tuesday. This position completely elides the fact that the underlying issue here, the very thing that makes Durant’s tweets so bizarre, isn’t the act of clapping back at Twitter randos itself; it was that he was seemingly attempting to do so through a fake, anonymous Twitter account. That is why Jackson was so righteously forceful in his condemnation of Durant, and is the thing that Durant’s so-called “owning” of his tweets conveniently ignored.
Anyone can understand the urge to be petty on Twitter, especially if you’re the target of so much hate. But to be a multi-millionaire, a global icon, a world champion, and yet still be so put out by the opinions of nobodies that you’d create a fake account to defend yourself in the third person is to go far past relatable humanity and firmly into the corniest of corn cob territory.
But hey, Kevin “The Egg” Durant is better than Kevin “The Servant” Durant, so maybe this is all for the good.