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Kevin Durant has bolted from the Oklahoma City Thunder to sign a two-year, $54.3 million free agent contract with the Golden State Warriors, sources told ESPN's Marc Stein. The deal includes a player option after the first year.
He leaves a team that was one win away from beating Golden State to face the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2016 NBA Finals, to now being a part of the team he lost to. He'll now be a teammate of stars Draymond Green, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
Stephen A. Smith, the outspoken host of ESPN's First Take, has weighed in with his opinion on the move.
"I'm viewing it as the weakest move I've ever seen from a superstar. Plain and simple, that's just how I look at it," Smith said. "It's not that he's leaving Oklahoma City. If you're not happy there, you wanna move on and you wanna grow as a player ... there's nothing wrong with that. He's one of the top three players in the world. He's a quintessential superstar. He deserves all the credit in the world for the talent he possesses
"But the flipside is this. (Oklahoma City) was up 3-1 in the Western Conference Finals," Smith continued. "Not one, not two, but three different times he was 48 minutes removed from getting to the NBA Finals by winning the Western Conference. Three times he failed. And you depart for the team that beat you? When you're on the cusp of getting to the Finals yourself? Ultimately, winning the championship for the franchise that you've been with since you've come into the NBA. I think it's incredibly weak. And I don't wanna hear any comparisons of that to LeBron James, when LeBron left Cleveland for South Beach. When LeBron left Cleveland the cupboard was bare."
Ouch!
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