Colin Cowherd: ‘Kevin Durant tanked his own career’

Kevin Durant won’t end up on anyone’s Mount Rushmore of NBA players, and according to Colin Cowherd, he only has himself to blame.

Durant became the eighth player in NBA history to reach 30,000 career points Tuesday night. And at 36 years old, while averaging 27 points per game, Durant is still a highly effective player who will undoubtedly continue adding to that number. It’s a great achievement for an all-time great player.

Cowherd praised Durant for the achievement Wednesday afternoon on his Fox Sports Radio and FS1 show. But he also portrayed Durant as being an NBA player who pulled his own career off the trajectory it was once on, and he did it too soon.

“Kevin Durant is more the artist who halfway through the tour, cancels the tour, sues Ticketmaster and gets into a fistfight with his drummer.” – Colin Cowherd pic.twitter.com/nrLVfTeQUz

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) February 12, 2025

“It’s a milestone on an irrelevant team, in a loss. And that sort of sums up his career,” Cowherd said of Durant. “But what’s amazing is that everybody loves to bang on coaches in the NBA and general managers. That guy for Dallas is getting crushed. But I said it at the time, and I was shocked at the lack of agreement within NBA media. Kevin Durant tanked his own career, he really did.

“At the time, when he was with Golden State, half the people covering the league said he was better than LeBron. He was beating LeBron, he was a better offensive player, he made Steph look small. He was MVP of Finals. The league thought it was unfair, Adam Silver was uncomfortable with how dominant they were. And then he decided, ‘I want to go play with Kyrie in Brooklyn.’ The hell?”

Cowherd went on to claim the biggest difference between LeBron James and Durant is the fact that LeBron operates as a business, not a businessman.

“Kevin Durant is more the artist who halfway through the tour, cancels the tour, sues Ticketmaster and gets into a fistfight with his drummer,” Cowherd claimed in an interesting analogy.

It’s been nearly a decade since Durant controversially left Oklahoma City to join a team in Golden State that won 73 games the season before he arrived. Durant went on to win two NBA Finals MVPs with the Warriors, but he was always going to be viewed as having joined a championship team instead of building one. Undoubtedly online enough to hear the criticism, Durant set out to prove he could build his own championship team and joined the Brooklyn Nets with Kyrie Irving.

Since leaving Golden State, Durant hasn’t gotten close to another Finals appearance. His tenures in Brooklyn and now Phoenix have been major disappointments. In retrospect, leaving Golden State was a mistake, or as Cowherd put it, he “tanked his own career.” He probably would have won more championships by staying in Golden State, but continuing to hitch his career to Stephen Curry similarly would have been deemed a mistake. Durant set out to prove he could win a championship without the Warriors and he failed.

He did, however, succeed in one area, successfully ending the NBA’s super team era. But they probably won’t put that on his Hall of Fame plaque.