Kevin Durant is going to play for the Houston Rockets after a trade sending Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the No. 10 overall pick this year and a host of second-round picks to the Phoenix Suns.
00:00Gut reaction. Was your gut reaction happiness, middle of the road?
00:04My gut reaction was like, oh, cool, something's happening.
00:08And then I saw the compensation, and that's exactly the type of compensation that we had said is acceptable.
00:18Jalen Green, if you have to give up one guy, it's sad to see Dylan Brooks go.
00:23And those guys, that's a whole lot of minutes out of those two during a game.
00:26Luckily, you have young guys in your core that can come in, and Jabari and Tari and all those guys can come in and pick up the slack.
00:35But the compensation, just giving up one first-round pick in a slew of seconds for a guy that was, by true shooting, the second-best shooter in the league last year.
00:44And I think that's one thing that's lost a little bit.
00:47When I see people really down on this, I don't think they understand just how effective Kevin Durant still is.
00:53The big question is just, okay, but he is old, obviously.
00:56He's going to decline over the next couple of years, and he missed time.
01:00He's missed a chunk of time pretty regularly in each of the last, or not in each of the last few seasons, but over the last several seasons.
01:07So I was excited about it.
01:09I think, look, this isn't a great mystery.
01:12There's no way you can win a championship with that Rockets offense looking the way it did last year.
01:17It's an awesome, regular-season offense when you can rely on second-chance points and scoring in transition.
01:24But versus really good defenses in the playoffs, that tends to dry up, and we saw that.
01:29So they had to do something.
01:30Yeah.
01:30And this, compared to the filling in around the fringes, when, again, you still have all these other young players who aren't great shooters but deserve to get a chance, it's about as, other than the age factor, it's about as perfect a scenario as I could have asked for.
01:47The age factor is big.
01:48The availability factor is big.
01:50Fortunately, he's on a team now where they can manage that sort of thing.
01:53And they can win games in the regular season, resting Kevin Durant.
01:57To me, Seth, the biggest things with this trade, the biggest things with this trade, in terms of what they gave up, is as soon as I saw the package, you and I were texting five minutes after this trade, kind of looking at each other going, this feels like a really good deal for the Rockets.
02:10And to me, the two biggest things were they didn't have to give up any of their young, long, athletic, defensive-oriented wings.
02:19You know, Jabari Smith Jr., whose name had popped up a lot in the last week.
02:24Tari Eason, who would have made a perfect trade piece, I think, for Phoenix.
02:27That's a good young player.
02:28And then the big one, Ahmed Thompson was never going anywhere.
02:30But the fact that you still have those three on the team and what they bring defensively and in terms of versatility is awesome.
02:37From a draft capital perspective, the fact that all they're getting out of you is the 10th pick coming up this week, which if you held on to that pick, is a guy who's not getting on the floor for you.
02:47So you give up that pick.
02:48You don't get the 2027 Phoenix pick and the 2029 Phoenix pick, both unprotected, are still yours on a team that looks like it has no future right now.
03:00So you keep those picks.
03:01You give up a bunch of second-rounders, but second-rounders in the NBA are like sixth-rounders in the NFL.
03:06You can find ways to get second-round picks in the NBA.
03:10By and large, people that are given basically both teams pretty good grades on this because of the situations that they're both in, it played out exactly the way you'd like it to, where Rafael Stone did not look, and I don't think he genuinely ever was, desperate to get Kevin Durant.
03:27And the Suns had their back up against the wall.
03:30Durant only wanted to go to so many different places.
03:34And they get a bunch of second-rounders that they can use to potentially prop up that 10th overall pick or whatever they need to do.
03:41It just, the compensation makes a whole lot of sense.
03:46And the biggest objection we've gotten from listeners is, hey, the Suns tried this already and they didn't do anything with Durant.
03:53Just by way of illustration, I don't think people realize what a mess the Suns are.
03:57The Suns had a 33-29 record with Durant on the floor this year.
04:01And you might say, yeah, see, he didn't do anything.
04:03They were 3-17 when he didn't play.
04:05This is not, the Suns are not the Rockets.
04:08Like, this is, these are completely two different universes.
04:11Great point.
04:12It's a great point.
04:13And most of the people, because I've talked to a lot of people over the last 24 hours.
04:17I walked the neighborhood, talked to some people yesterday, interacting with a lot of people on social media.
04:23I've got the poll here, and I want you to guess in a minute, Seth, what the results.
04:26I mean, I put up an approval poll on this trade.
04:29Seth will try to guess it here.
04:31But the people that don't like this trade, by and large, don't like it because they just don't like Kevin Durant.
04:39Yeah.
04:39Or they like Jalen Green a lot.
04:41Or they like Jalen Green.
04:42If you're a huge Jalen Green fan.
04:43That's fair.
04:44Yeah, there's that too.
04:46Most of the ones I talked to was a Durant fan, but you're absolutely right about Jalen Green.
04:50And my counter to that is, tell me where they got worse yesterday.
04:54Put personalities aside.
04:55Tell me where they got worse yesterday.
04:58They're not worse defensively through this trade.
04:59Durant actually has some okay defensive metrics, by the way.
05:03He's still fairly long, and when he's D-ing a guy up, you can't change his wingspan.
05:07So there's that.
05:08But I'm not here to tell you he's an all-defensive player.
05:10They didn't get worse defensively.
05:11They didn't get worse on the glass.
05:13They didn't get worse in terms of just dog-ness on their team.
05:16Kevin Durant has some dog in him, no question about that.
05:19The two things that they were awful at last year, half-court offense and shooting,
05:24he is arguably the best weapon in both of those areas in the last 20 years in the NBA.
05:31And to your point, Seth, still elite.
05:34Averaging over 25 a game.
05:35Shooting over 50% from the field.
05:38Shooting over 40% from three.
05:39He's done that three years in a row.
05:40He's the only guy in the history of the game to do that.
05:42For guys that qualified by usage rates and minutes played and all that,
05:47Jokic is the only guy with a higher true shooting percentage.
05:51He's still an incredibly effective shooter.
05:54And then defensively, if you think about, okay, how do you beat Oklahoma City?
05:58His height does a lot to combat all the length that those perimeter defenders that Oklahoma City has.
06:05So this, it's a shot in the arm and the most way possible to address what ails the Rockets
06:15in terms of them just not being a genuine top-tier, like, okay,
06:20we can compete with a really good defense in the playoffs.
06:23So this keeps them out of being just a good and effective regular season offense
06:28and helps put them into postseason offense.
06:30No question.
06:31That's the big thing, too, the availability.
06:33He needs to be available in April.
06:34Oh, yeah, that's right.
06:36Yeah, so the load management becomes key, obviously.
06:38And that's where, I mean, the pressure gets on to Tyra East and Reed Shepard, Cam Whitmore.
06:43You know, Cam Whitmore, I'm guessing, isn't going to have a trade request looming at any point or agitation.
06:48He's got a role now.
06:50He and Reed Shepard have roles on this team now.
06:52There's no question about it.
06:53All right, so what do you think Rocket fans thought of this trade, Seth?
06:56I'm guessing.
06:57I'll tell you, there's three choices.
06:59So let me lay it out for you here.
07:00Rocket fans, do you approve of the trade for Kevin Durant?
07:05The three choices are strongly approve, I'm okay with it, or I do not approve.
07:11Okay, let me do the combined positive part.
07:14Yeah.
07:15And I'm trying to, I got to factor in on social media, you know, the negative, the negative tends to be about threefold louder than the positive.
07:22I'm going to say the two first categories, the positive, either strongly approve or what was the second?
07:29I'm okay with it.
07:30Okay with it.
07:31That's it, 77% combined.
07:34Okay, it's, no, it's not, it's high, but it's even higher than that.
07:39It's even higher than that.
07:39Oh, really?
07:40Oh, nice.
07:40Yeah, yeah, yeah.
07:41Okay.
07:4291% combined.
07:44Oh, wow.
07:45I'm gladly wrong on that.
07:46Combined, yeah, yeah.
07:47Now, 50.2% strongly approve.
07:515%, I'm okay with it.
07:53So, technically, 90.7%.
07:56There's only 9.3% of the people that voted in this that say, I do not approve of this trade.
08:01I think a lot of this, too, in terms of people who might have been on the fence or were skeptical of it,
08:06maybe because they dislike Kevin Durant.
08:08Let's say that.
08:09Fair.
08:10Totally fair, if that's how you feel.
08:11Yeah.
08:11I think the fact that Udoka is obviously 100% on board with this and has prior experience with Durant.
08:19And remember, Udoka had prior experience in the same place as he had with James Harden in Brooklyn.
08:27And Udoka did not seem to be all that high on bringing Harden back in.
08:30But if he's high on bringing Durant back in, it's a stamp of approval for a guy in Udoka who just right now is at an all-time high.
08:38And Udoka and D'Amico probably have approval ratings well above 90% right now amongst Houston sports fans.
08:46I think they've got a pretty good filter for the right type of player to fit what they want to do also.
08:51I think they're very similar in that respect.
08:53I think, yeah, there's a swarm quotient to it.
08:55Yes.
08:55Okay.
08:56D'Amico and Udoka both seem to have a good feel for, hey, what kind of guy.
09:01Kind of like Calvin Sampson.
09:02You know, Calvin Sampson creates this ecosystem where he brings in guys that respond to his type of coaching.
09:09I think Udoka's the same way.
09:11He, as it is with D'Amico, they kind of get a feel for which guys will thrive and add to this culture.
09:17So that's, for me, that's the rubber stamp that says, yeah, it makes sense.
09:22And I'm as concerned as anybody else would be about his age.
09:26And you just have to take it into context and look at how he is as a player.
09:32This is not a guy who's coming in and you're just trying to scavenge up the last little scraps of a great career.
09:39So a lot of the previous Rockets trades where they had Hall of Famers in their dying gasp moments, it's just not the same thing.
09:46I've got some numbers to that effect.
09:48Because this is, this is, Kevin Durant is the latest of what's been a litany of former All-Stars to come through the door over the last decade with the Rockets.
09:58And yeah, Durant needs to be different than those guys.
10:00The numbers are pretty astounding as to what they did once they got here.
