Kevin Durant Reflects on Best Teams: Warriors vs. Nets
Kevin Durant has spent a good chunk of his post-Warriors life trying to explain his choices. Now he’s explaining his teams.
And, predictably, Golden State is right back in the middle of it.
In a recent appearance with Boardroom, Durant was asked a simple question with a loaded history: what’s the best team — on paper — he’s ever played on?
His first instinct wasn’t the 73-win machine he helped turn into a juggernaut. It wasn’t even a Warriors team at all.
Durant went straight to Brooklyn.
He started rattling off names: Kyrie Irving. James Harden. Blake Griffin. LaMarcus Aldridge. Paul Millsap. Patty Mills. Star after star, résumé after résumé.
“We had the names on that team,” Durant said, leaning on the word that has followed that Nets era ever since: names. Not banners. Not rings. Names.
From there, he explained why he didn’t immediately put his Golden State years at the top of the list. Yes, those Warriors teams had Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. Yes, they won at the highest level. But Durant framed the question strictly around accolades.
“I know people are going to say, ‘the Warriors, you had Steph and Klay,’” Durant said. “But I’m like, when you look at that team, though. At the time, Steph was an MVP but Klay and Draymond didn’t get the accolades at that time. They were like one-time All-Stars.
“These [Nets players] I’m talking about already completed their careers, damn near, and got all of their accolades on top of me, James and Kyrie. So when you’re just putting accolades on the table, I would say that team.”
It’s the same line he used not long ago when he stirred things up by saying the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers were more talented on paper than his title-winning Warriors teams. That comparison already brushed up against the pride of his former Golden State teammates. This one hit even closer.
Klay Thompson, by all accounts, wasn’t thrilled with the implication that those Warriors sides were somehow light on star power or respect at the time. For a core that defined an era, being reduced to “one-time All-Stars” doesn’t sit easily.
But as the clip made the rounds and the reaction bubbled, Durant circled back. With a bit more reflection — and one key memory jog — he adjusted his answer.
“Obviously, the best team I played on was the Warriors,” he said. No hesitation this time. Then he got specific. “I want to say the 2019 team was crazy, but we got hurt. With Cousins at the five, that’s probably the best team I’ve been a part of on paper.”
The missing piece in his first answer? DeMarcus Cousins.
Durant admitted that 2018-19 slipped his mind in the moment because Cousins barely featured compared with the rest of his career. The big man missed a significant stretch of that season, and Durant himself didn’t share the floor with him as often as expected before injuries wrecked their title defense.
“I forgot about Cuz. I didn’t play with Cuz a lot that year, because he got hurt,” Durant said. “But when you look at it on paper, it’s probably, yeah.” Then he added a caveat that will keep the Nets era from disappearing entirely: “That Brooklyn team is a close second.”
There’s a telling contrast in how he talks about the two. Golden State gets the nod as the best team, the one that actually did it — the group that turned talent into trophies, even if the 2019 version fell apart under the weight of injuries. Brooklyn, though, still tugs at him in a different way.
Durant admitted he regrets not finishing the job with the Nets. With that much star power compressed into one locker room, he could see what the payoff might have looked like if everything had held together.
He didn’t need numbers to explain that part. He went straight to the feeling.
He said he knew the atmosphere around a Nets championship would have been tremendous. The franchise’s first title. A superteam finally delivering in a market that had been waiting for its own moment separate from the Knicks’ shadow. Durant, Irving, Harden and that cast of veterans rewriting a chaotic chapter into a crowning one.
It never happened. The names stayed names. The Warriors stayed champions.
Durant has played on teams that broke basketball and teams that broke apart. When he talks about “on paper” now, it’s hard not to hear a subtext: talent is one thing, legacy is another. And as he keeps revisiting his own, Golden State still holds the trump card — even if it sometimes takes him a minute to say it out loud.
