Time for Kevin Durant to get back to playing basketball

Kevin Durant is a member of the league-best Golden State Warriors, a team on the verge of dynasty. He is an NBA champion and Finals MVP. Life is good for KD and the future is bright for the Warriors, who will look to capture their third championship in four years come June.

Yet, as Ramona Shelburne of ESPN wrote yesterday in an article after media day, Durant’s recent Twitter controversy has prevented him from being as happy as he should be.

Maybe this will end up being a good thing. After taking the high road all of last season, Durant has seemingly unburdened himself of the real reasons he left OKC. No more pretending. Whether he intended to go public with those feelings or not, he did. So now it's out there and everyone can deal with it, including Durant himself.

Maybe this will get him off of social media, or at least lessen his engagement with it...For now though, Durant's just trying to digest it and find his way back to happy.

Twittergate 2K17 “KD Edition” is the latest in series of peculiar words and actions from the Finals MVP this offseason. It started with his comment that, “Nobody wants to play in Under Armours”—a perceived shot at Steph Curry’s apparel sponsor and shoe line.

It continued with the insoles of his KD 10’s “Finals”, which featured all the insults leveled at him after joining the Warriors. Stepping on his haters is a pretty #petty move. But that’s still understandable because of the vitriol he received.

Things really escalated when Durant’s efforts to clapback at Twitter trolls came to light, actions that even he labeled as “childish” and “idiotic”. On September 17th, he tweeted negative comments about his former team and coach, claiming he “couldn’t win with those cats” and didn’t want to play with them. You can read plenty more about what happened there here and here, but the bottom line is that it caps off a strange summer of activity for Durant, who seems more focused on responding to the events his past than on his current team.

One silver lining: he didn't claim to be hacked, and he did own up and apologize for his negative tweets. But no matter how you slice it, the Twitter activity and careless words throughout the summer has been a bad look for the 2017 NBA Finals MVP, who reached the pinnacle of basketball glory in June.

Ultimately, this will all blow over when the offseason ends, actual basketball is being played, and the Warriors start winning again. Warriors coach Steve Kerr helped to put things in perspective on media day saying, “It’s not anything that concerns us, we just move on, and it’s not a big deal.”

As Durant himself said about the issue at Tech Crunch in San Francisco the other day, he definitely wants “to move on and keep playing basketball.”

Thankfully, let’s just be glad that the time is nearing when Durant has the opportunity to do just that: Balling out.