Burner account or not, Kevin Durant is bitter, petty and entirely relatable | NBA
They, I call these messages “KD files”. There’s no definitive proof that Kevin Durant is the man behind the X account @gethigher77 (display name: getoffmydickerson), but if he isn’t, someone has stolen his identity in a phenomenal way. In various screenshots circulating on the Internet, getoffmydickerson shot Durant’s teammates, as the player himself once did. There was also some creative and fun trash talk, something Durant showed a talent for. Some cross the line: the account makes an objectionable joke about supplying drones (Durant invests in the company Skydio, which has supplied weapons to the Israeli army) and called Durant’s teammate Jabari Smith Jr. “retarded.” When asked about @gethigher77, Durant said, “I’m not here to get into Twitter nonsense” — far from a denial that he was behind it, and in the eyes of many, a confirmation that he was. We have people writing in-depth proofs of the reality of the story.
It’s not that taking down MyDickerson is Durant’s only problem. Shortly after the tweet explosion, Boardroom, which describes itself as a “sports, media and entertainment brand” co-founded by Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman, fired three of its editors, rationalizing the move as part of a pivot to video. (An aside: What’s the point of having a career income of half a billion dollars if you’re not willing to invest some of it to protect your media business from financial headwinds?)
On the ground, things are not much better. Durant’s Houston Rockets – picked by two of the Guardian’s four contributors to win this season’s title – got off to a strong start but have slumped in recent months. The Rockets are on track for the playoffs, but any of the millions of NBA podcasts will tell you right now that they are not title contenders.
And this despite the fact that Durant mostly played brilliantly. The day after the pixel storm on his so-called burner account, he scored 35 points. Rockets head coach Ime Udoka plays his starters for almost the entire game – Durant, who is the oldest player in the rotation, has logged more minutes this season than all but two players in the league. When asked about his playing burden, the 37-year-old seemed more than happy with his responsibilities. “This is what I get paid to do,” he said.
And that brings us to the heart of what’s intriguing about Durant. Although his love for basketball is more obvious and purer than that of most players — he’s the kind of guy you worry about retiring — he struggled with elements of his career peripheral to the game. In 2016, he left his longtime team, the Thunder, for the already stacked Warriors, and that move came just after Golden State beat Oklahoma City in the playoffs. This decision is as infamous as all of Durant’s on-court exploits, and it essentially ruined the balance of power in the league for three seasons, until Durant left for the Brooklyn Nets again. There has been a charitable interpretation of Durant’s decision to join Golden State — simply that he took a better job, as Barry Petchesky argued on Deadspin in 2016 — that almost no one has bought into. “Anyone who criticizes Durant for joining a dominant team would jump at the chance to do so in their own professional lives,” Petchesky wrote. “But the athletes? I guess they owe you something.” We could apply the same logic to the burner scandal. It’s bad if it’s true, of course, but most of us who crucified Durant also talked shit about our colleagues.
NBA fans demand that players win a championship to validate their greatness; one wonders how different the discourse around Luka Dončić would be this season if he had a title or two under his belt. Although Durant won the NBA Finals with the Warriors in 2017 and 2018, earning Finals MVP both years, the work he did to win those championships is generally less appreciated than… well, just about any other star player’s contributions to a title-winning team. That’s not completely unfair, considering Durant joined the Warriors when they were coming off a historically great 73-9 season. Still, finally landing on the white whale and being told you used the wrong weapon to do it will make a guy bitter. And giving yourself the best possible chance at a championship is understandable given that a lot of it can come down to luck. Durant knows this himself: In 2021, he appeared to score a game-winning three-pointer in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Milwaukee Bucks. It turned out he had his foot on the line. The Bucks won and took home the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Durant is honest about his bitterness, sometimes to a fault. A significant portion of Zach Baron’s 2017 GQ profile on Durant describes the superstar’s anguish following the fallout from his former Thunder teammates’ dissent — “KD couldn’t win with these cats” — from his main social media account. The tone of getoffmydickerson’s posts is so consistent with things Durant has said before that it is almost irrelevant to his reputation that he said those things. Anyone who knew his story might have been shaken by the content of some of the messages from his so-called burner account, but they wouldn’t have been surprised that this account existed.
It feels like Durant wishes he could play basketball in a total vacuum sometimes, without media or stories or maybe even fans. This is why he is the most famous superstar in the league. That every NBA player doesn’t sometimes break down emotionally under the pressure of the personal and absurd criticism that follows them daily online is a wonder. Fans say whatever they want about players on social media, then remark on how absurd it is that these players seem to care what anyone else says about them. A gamer with Burner accounts, lurking on Reddit and can’t ignore the noise? This seems like a completely natural consequence of fame in the age of social media.
One could look at Durant’s career and say it didn’t pan out the way it was supposed to, with Golden State’s phenomenal fortunes and disappointment everywhere else. (Because of our absurd championship expectations, of course.) I’d say the fans are lucky it happened this way. The careers of great players are rarely so honest and show how difficult it is to live up to expectations.
