When news dropped on Sunday that Kevin Durant had been traded to the Houston Rockets, the 36-year-old forward was onstage for a panel at Fanatics Fest in New York. Taylor Rooks announced the deal to the boisterous crowd, which reacted with an impassioned reaction befitting a blockbuster trade for an all-time talent.
Slumped over in a chair, dressed in an all-black ensemble, Durant leaned back, flashed a nervous smile, and offered Rooks a canned response when she asked for his reaction to the deal.
“We gon’ see what happens, man,” Durant said, gathering his thoughts. “We gonna see.”
The trade marks yet another pivot point in one of the greatest yet most confounding careers in NBA history. For nearly 20 years, Durant has stretched the bounds of what we think an NBA player can be. A 7-foot wing, he shoots like Reggie Miller, sports a post game that rivals Kobe Bryant’s, and commands an offensive repertoire that influenced a generation of big men to follow his example. He's an MVP and a scoring champ. He's gone toe-to-toe with LeBron James on the biggest stage and won. And even after 17 seasons, he remains one of the league’s most devastating offensive forces.
But Durant's all-world ability has been clouded by his propensity to chase bad situations. Despite his usual individual brilliance, KD has won just a single playoff series over the past five years. His teams have been undone by poor health, front office mismanagement, and his own discontentment. When you zoom out, it’s hard to contextualize Durant's career—he’s a surefire Hall of Famer, and his résumé stacks up against those of the best players in NBA history. But his later years have lacked real stakes, memorable moments, and the type of enduring relationship with a fan base that often defines NBA greatness.
Now, Durant has been granted a chance to write a new—and possibly final—chapter. Houston was reportedly one of Durant’s preferred destinations, and unlike some of his past choices, the Rockets seem like a perfect landing spot. The Rockets won 52 games last season, led by coach Ime Udoka and the core of Amen Thompson, Jabari Smith Jr., Fred VanVleet, and Alperen Sengun, who pushed the Golden State Warriors to seven games in the first round even though they didn’t have a go-to scoring option in clutch moments. Durant more than fills that hole, having made a career of big shots. And the almost-37-year-old also has a bevy of wisdom to share with this young roster.
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“I felt like I've always led by example,” Durant told me shortly after he arrived in Arizona in 2023. “I didn't operate any different going to Brooklyn than I did when I was in Texas, OKC, Golden State. It was all the same stuff for me. … But I think I impacted everybody I worked with.”
The fit between KD and the Rockets seems like a basketball match made in heaven. But the stakes are high for Durant, who will have to show whether he can break a pattern that has followed him throughout his career: He plays great basketball, grows unhappy, and then leverages his supreme talent to find a new situation. Compared with what the Suns originally gave up to acquire him in 2023, the relatively light trade return from the Rockets—Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the no. 10 pick in this year’s draft, and five future second-rounders—reflects the realities of Durant’s age and the deterioration of his past two teams. If he can elevate the Rockets into contenders, it would go a long way toward undoing the gloomy irrelevance of KD’s past few years. If things go south in Houston as well, his pattern of curious decision-making will threaten to override the splendor of his otherwise illustrious career.
This isn’t the first time the nomadic all-world forward has orchestrated his way to what he envisions as greener pastures. In Oklahoma City from 2008 to 2016, Durant led the Thunder to five 50-plus-win seasons alongside Russell Westbrook—and, for two years, James Harden. Then, following an urge for a more free-flowing offense and a fresh start, he joined the Golden State Warriors. He, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green won two championships as the Warriors became one of the most unstoppable teams of all time, but Durant didn’t quite find what he had been looking for. After the tumultuous 2018-19 season, which featured an on-court argument with Green, never-ending rumors about his upcoming free agency, and a devastating torn Achilles in the NBA Finals, Durant left for the Brooklyn Nets, joining forces with Kyrie Irving, his best friend at the time.
A subsequent trade for James Harden in 2021 made the Nets contenders, and Brooklyn came within a shoe length of beating the Bucks in that year’s Eastern Conference semifinals. But infighting between Irving and Harden undid the team’s harmony, and Harden requested, and was later granted, a trade out of town in 2022. Durant and Irving later followed suit, and Durant was on the move again a year later.
In Durant’s first season in Phoenix, the Suns, also featuring Devin Booker and Chris Paul, were eliminated by the Nuggets in the 2023 Western Conference semifinals. The next season, they traded Paul for Bradley Beal, and just as in Brooklyn, the bottom began to fall out from under Durant’s world. The Suns blindsided Durant at the 2025 trade deadline, offering him to various teams in various packages, including a deal that would have sent him back to Golden State, which Durant declined. The episode put a clock on Durant’s time in Phoenix, and by the end of the season, infighting, injuries, and distrust between players and the coaching staff led to one of the most expensive flameouts in NBA history.
Durant’s latest move reunites him with Udoka, with whom he has long shared a warm relationship, all the way back to Durant’s early days with Team USA. When Brooklyn was in the market for a new coach following Steve Nash’s firing just before the 2022-23 season, Durant pushed for the Nets to hire Udoka. However, the team changed course in the wake of public outcry about the misconduct that led to Udoka’s dismissal from the Celtics. In Houston, a partnership with Udoka could help undo a reputation for clashing with coaches that Durant has built over the years.
Those problems with coaches have followed him on his many stops through the NBA. Durant's exit from the Bay Area arguably had more to do with his issues with Steve Kerr than any shouting match with Green. Durant repeatedly complained both publicly and privately about Kerr’s offensive principles during his final season with the Warriors, and he continued to do so even after he left for Brooklyn. The two have since reconciled, but league sources identify Kerr as among the reasons Durant opted not to return to Golden State at the trade deadline. In Gotham, Durant had similar critiques of Nash’s concepts, and the coach was later fired during Durant’s last season. And this past season, cameras routinely caught him in verbal spars with Suns coach Mike Budenholzer, urging him to simplify the offense, yelling at him during possession changes, or pouting in the corner in protest as the offense flowed without him.
Houston offers KD a chance to reverse all of that. Udoka has instilled a strong organization culture, and there’s a ready-made hole for Durant to step into. The Rockets are a defense-first team with a brute-force offensive identity that desperately needs his shot creation. Durant should feature heavily on that end of the floor, and he’ll finally be surrounded by a deep corps of young players who can ease his defensive burden. Even though they let go of Green and Brooks to acquire Durant, the Rockets remain one of the deepest teams in the NBA.
“I want the legacy to be champions,” Amen Thompson told me when describing his hopes for the team back in April. The Rockets came up short in a hard-fought series against the Warriors, but after adding Durant, they are positioned to challenge OKC at the top of the West.
For the past decade, Durant has controlled his destiny, but his decision-making has deprived him of the stage where his talent deserves to shine. Miraculously, he and the best stars of his generation have managed to remain relevant as a new crop of players comes up behind them. LeBron now has Luka to help him capture another title in L.A. Curry and Jimmy Butler found some magic last season that made them dangerous postseason foes before Curry injured his hamstring. Now, KD has been given a life raft—a new start in Houston on a team with a legitimate chance to contend for a title. The only question that remains is whether things will finally work out the way he imagines.
