NEW YORK _ Carmelo Anthony was right when he said not every player is mentally equipped to play for the Knicks. Kevin Durant openly says that he didn't want that burden.
While explaining why he "never planned" on signing with the Knicks in free agency, the Nets star said the attention and gravitas of the franchise was a turnoff. Instead of playing in the spotlight of the media and MSG, Durant said he preferred a relaxing destination in Brooklyn.
"Around February (of 2019) I was thinking, 'I didn't want to be the savior of the Knicks or New York.' I didn't care about being the King of New York. That never really moved me," Durant said JJ Redick's 'The Old Man and the Three' podcast. "I didn't care about being on Broadway. I just want to play ball and go to the crib and chill. So I felt like that's what Brooklyn embodied. And I wanted to live in New York. And I felt like Brooklyn is everything I'm about _ chill, on the low, all-black everything, we're quiet. Just focus on basketball. There's no show when you come to our games. No Madison Square, no Mecca. All of that s---. We're just going to hoop and build something new in Brooklyn."
The Knicks, of course, have long sold the Garden and their marketing power as their top draws. Beyond Carmelo, no stars have bit. Durant stating that he decided against signing with the Knicks in February is still noteworthy for a couple reasons, namely because former team president Steve Mills traded Kristaps Porzingis on Jan. 31 to clear the cap space for signing two stars _ presumably including Durant.
The move backfired and Durant claimed his connection to the Knicks was purely a media creation.
"I never planned on going to the Knicks. That was just the media putting that out there, especially when I didn't sign a three-year deal (as a free agent in 2018)," Durant said. "Once I signed a (one-year deal), just the noise got louder about me going to the Knicks for some reason. Knicks being the savior, you know how that goes. Every time a big free agent is up the Knicks are going to get him. So it just took off."
Durant then suggested the media in the Bay Area created the Knicks angle to create drama and "infiltrate the locker room." If Durant was annoyed at the time, he never publicly denied the interest in the Knicks. Instead, the questions were deflected.
Then in March of 2019, Knicks owner James Dolan said he heard his team will have a successful free agency while touting "the mecca of basketball." The failure to land a star last summer directly led to the firing of Mills, and the new regime of Leon Rose and William Wesley are entering their first free agency.
A source said they'll have interest in signing Raptors guard Fred VanVleet, and numerous reports suggest Carmelo Anthony is also on that list. And while Anthony is no longer a star, he's certainly not worried about the Knicks burden like Durant.
"I wanted it. It was something I wanted. I wanted to take that challenge on. Whether I failed at it or not I wanted to be able to say that I did it," Anthony said this season. "I took it upon myself to say, 'Get me there.' I wanted that challenge. Not everybody has that same mentality."
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