Suns' Kevin Durant calls out engagement baiters who 'don't like basketball'
Yesterday at 12:33 PM
After a strong slate of Christmas Day games, including a Phoenix Suns win to close it out, Kevin Durant, one of the NBA’s most popular players, naturally took to X, formerly Twitter, to further defend the NBA.
Over the past few weeks, discourse around the NBA has mostly centered on declining ratings and general interest in the league. But after the Suns’ 110-100 win over the Denver Nuggets, Durant said he was “locked in” on figuring out why the NBA’s popularity seems to be declining.
“It's a weird dialogue around the league and viewership,” Durant said [h/t Awful Announcing]. “It's not just — and I see a lot of people blaming the players for it. Something that big, it's not just one component of why it's going that way. I feel like it's a lot of different reasons why viewership may be down, but that's another discussion. But today was stepping in the right direction in [getting] people excited again for the game of basketball.”
Shortly thereafter, Durant logged onto X and started firing off posts, many of which were directed at fans complaining about the NBA. The first post was in response to a user lamenting the fact that San Antonio Spurs big man Victor Wembanyama and New York Knicks star Karl-Anthony Towns shot threes over each other instead of dunking on each other.
“Nostalgia got this man in every wrestling move u can think of,” Durant wrote, “we all wish we could be a kid again and experience life with no responsibilities, everything seemed better back then. Then u grow up….”
In the same thread, Durant said people like the original poster aren’t actually basketball fans.
“They are complaining for engagement,” Durant wrote. “They're screaming for more middies now when they hated them a few years ago. They will never be happy…because they don't really like basketball.”
Whether that is true or not, there have been a lot of complaints recently about the NBA. Some have tried to link the declining television ratings to the increase in three-point shots, while others have blamed illegal streams, multiple national cable and regional broadcasters, as well as load management.
The gripes were mostly quieted for Christmas, though, as each of the five games on the NBA’s biggest holiday were decided by 10 points or fewer. The game between the Spurs and the Knicks and the star-studded clash of the Los Angeles Lakers vs. the Golden State Warriors, in particular, were lauded for their competitiveness.
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