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During Game 5 of the NBA finals Warriors superstar Kevin Durant suffered a devastating Achilles injury after coming back from a calf strain injury that will keep him out for the entirety of next season.
Kevin Durant injury doesn't look good. Damn pic.twitter.com/RlTY84oDol
— Gifdsports (@gifdsports) June 11, 2019
Bleacher Report’s Ric Bucher went on to report that Durant wasn’t happy with the Warriors after the injury and began to question whether the team misled him about the consequences of coming back with a calf strain.
Via 957 The Game
What I’ve heard, through various places, is that he’s not really happy with how things went down because of the injury,”
“There’s an element of, ‘Was I misled as far as injuring myself coming back and playing and having a catastrophic injury like this coming off a calf strain.”
“We don’t know, definitively, exactly what was said, how much was said, how much he was aware of that, but I can tell you that people in the KD camp, people are running for cover because they don’t want to be holding the bag on who led him astray.”
“Because the bottomline is, what Steve Kerr said, ‘We didn’t think he could get injured worse.’ If Steve Kerr was told that, I’m sure KD was told that. And now he’s looking at the prospect of not playing for, possibly, a year and having his free agency upended. I don’t see how that makes him happier with the Warriors than he was before.”
ESPN’s Jay Williams, who is close friends with Durant, backed Bucher’s report and blamed the Warriors for KD’s injury.
This falls on the Golden State Warriors. He got misdiagnosed, I know for a fact that he was told that with a partially torn calf that it unloaded the pressure on the Achilles, that there was no chance that the Achilles could be injured at all, and for that to happen in the first half of a ball game I can’t even fathom that
Today, Durant sat down with Yahoo Sports’ Chris B. Haynes and finally set the record straight about whether he felt the Warriors mishandled his injury.
Via Yahoo Sports
So we got straight to it. Did the Warriors mishandle the injury?
Durant slowly straightened up with a perplexed expression on his face.
“Hell, no. How can you blame [the Warriors]? Hell, no,” Durant told Yahoo Sports. “I heard the Warriors pressured me into getting back. Nobody never said a word to me during rehab as I was coming back. It was only me and [director of sports medicine and performance] Rick [Celebrini] working out every day. Right when the series started, I targeted Game 5. Hell, nah. It just happened. It’s basketball. S— happens. Nobody was responsible for it. It was just the game. We just need to move on from that s— because I’m going to be back playing.”
“No matter what the series was, I was aiming for Game 5,” he said. “That’s why I played when it was 3-1. No matter what, I just wanted to play in the Finals. I just wanted to hoop, especially if I could be out there. I was feeling good leading up to it. I was working out every day. I was gradually getting back to myself doing the two-a-days. I was really locked in on my game and trying to get back. I really wanted to play in that series.”
Hopefully, this clears the Warriors medical team from all the criticism that they got after KD went down in game 5.