Suns Ruined Kevin Durant's Retirement Plans

PHOENIX — Kevin Durant didn’t want it to end this way.

Durant, traded this past summer from the Phoenix Suns, now finds himself on a dangerous Houston Rockets team looking to contend for an NBA title.

As he trickles into the twilight of his career, the former Suns star wanted to stay in the desert.

“I wanted to retire in Phoenix,” Durant told Sports Illustrated in a recent featured interview.

“I really had good intentions when I stepped foot in there. The picture in your head doesn’t always come to fruition.”

Durant’s departure was an unfortunate result of failure from Phoenix’s big three era of himself, Bradley Beal and Devin Booker. The trio was thought to have the best shot at bringing home a franchise first NBA Finals – though the collective stars never won a playoff game together.

Durant, heavily involved in trade rumors at last year’s deadline, was moved to Houston for a sum of parts that included No. 10 overall pick Khaman Maluach, Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green.

“From a basketball standpoint, I felt like our best lineups were me at the five with four guards that were under 6′ 5″,” Durant continued to SI’s Chris Mannix.

“That’s a horrible formula to win basketball games at a high level, especially when teams are consciously getting bigger. I think we can speak on a mental aspect of the game as much as we want, but I think that physical aspect of the game is why we weren’t successful as a team.”

The Suns were under pressure, to put it lightly. They mortgaged their future to go all-in now with Mat Ishbia. For whatever reason, it didn’t work.

“In Phoenix, everything had to work perfect for us,” said Durant. “I felt like when we played well, we could compete with anybody in the league. But the great teams, they could make a couple of mistakes and their talent from top to bottom could mask that a little bit.

“We didn’t have that type of room for error. And that was a little frustrating. It’s not a bad place to be. I felt like we had a chance every night with the talent that we had, but I wish we had a little bit more room for mistakes. If you turn it over here, give up a rebound there—we couldn’t allow that at all in Phoenix, so that was tough to deal with.”