Burner account or not, Kevin Durant is bitter, petty and entirely relatable

They’re calling the posts the “KD Files”. There’s no definitive proof that Kevin Durant is the man behind the X account @gethigher77 (display name: getoffmydickerson), but if he isn’t, somebody has done a phenomenal impersonation. In various screenshots splashed across the internet, getoffmydickerson took shots at Durant’s teammates, as the player himself has done before. There was also creative and amusing trash talk, something Durant has shown a talent for. Some of it crossed the line: the account made a reprehensible joke about supplying drones (Durant invests in the company Skydio, which has provided the Israel Defense Forces with weapons)and called Durant’s teammate Jabari Smith Jr “retarded”. When asked about @gethigher77, Durant said, “I’m not here to get into Twitter nonsense” – far from a denial that he was behind it, and in the eyes of many, confirmation that he was. We’ve got people writing in-depth proofs that the account is real.

Not that getoffmydickerson is Durant’s only problem. Shortly after the tweets blew up, Boardroom, which defines itself as a “sports, media, and entertainment brand” co-founded by Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman, laid off three of its staff writers, rationalizing the move as part of a pivot to video. (An aside: what’s the point of having career earnings of half a billion dollars if you’re not willing to invest some of it to protect your media company from financial headwinds?)

On the court, things aren’t much better. Durant’s Houston Rockets – picked by two of four Guardian contributors to win the title this season – had a bright start but have fallen off in the last few months. The Rockets are on course for the playoffs, but any of the million NBA podcasts out there will tell you right now that they’re not a title contender.

That’s despite the fact that Durant has mostly played brilliantly. The day after the pixelstorm over his alleged burner account, he scored 35 points. Rockets head coach Ime Udoka plays his starters for almost the entire game – Durant, who is the oldest player in the rotation, has logged more minutes this season than all but two players in the league. When asked about his playing burden, the 37-year-old sounded more than happy with his responsibilities. “That’s what I get paid to do,” he said.

And that gets to the heart of what is intriguing about Durant. While his love for basketball is more evident and pure than most players’ – he’s the kind of guy you worry for in retirement – he’s struggled with elements of his career peripheral to the game. In 2016, he left his longtime team, the Thunder, for the already-stacked Warriors, and the move came right after Golden State had beaten Oklahoma City in the playoffs. The move is as infamous as any of Durant’s on-court heroics are famous, and it essentially ruined the balance of power in the league for three seasons, until Durant departed again, for the Brooklyn Nets. There was a charitable interpretation of Durant’s decision to join Golden State – simply that he took a better job, as Barry Petchesky argued on Deadspin in 2016 – that almost nobody bought into. “Everyone criticizing Durant for joining a dominant team would leap at the opportunity to do so in their own work life,” Petchesky wrote. “But athletes? I guess they owe you something.” You could apply the same logic to the burner scandal. Bad if true, for sure, but surely most of us crucifying Durant have also talked shit about our co-workers.

NBA fans demand that players win a championship to validate their greatness; you wonder how different the discourse around Luka Dončić this season would look if he had a title or two under his belt. Despite Durant winning the NBA finals with the Warriors in 2017 and 2018, nabbing the Finals MVP both years, the work he did to earn those championships is generally regarded less highly than … well, just about any other star player’s contributions to a title-winning team. That’s not completely unfair, given that Durant joined the Warriors when they were fresh off a historically excellent 73-9 season. Still, finally landing the white whale only to be told you used the wrong weapon to do so will make a guy bitter. And giving yourself the best shot you can at a championship is understandable considering how much of it can come down to luck. Durant knows that himself: in 2021, he appeared to hit a game-winning three-pointer in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals against the Milwaukee Bucks. It turned out he had his foot on the line. The Bucks won and went on to lift the Larry O’Brien trophy.

Durant is honest about his bitterness, sometimes to a fault. A significant portion of Zach Baron’s 2017 GQ profile of Durant depicts the superstar’s anguish during the fallout of dissing his former Thunder teammates – “KD couldn’t win with those cats” – from his main social media account. The tone of getoffmydickerson’s posts is so consistent with things Durant has said before that it’s almost irrelevant to his reputation whether he said these things. Anyone who knew his history might have been jolted by the content of some of the messages from his alleged burner account, but they wouldn’t have been surprised that the account existed.

You get the sense that Durant wishes he could play basketball in a total vacuum sometimes, without media or narratives or maybe even fans. It’s for that reason that he’s the league’s most relatable superstar. That every NBA player doesn’t occasionally crack emotionally under the pressure of absurd, personal criticism that follows them online every day is a marvel. Fans say anything they want about players on social media, then remark at how absurd it is that those players seem to care about what other people say about them. A player with burner accounts, who lurks on Reddit, and who can’t tune out the noise? That seems like an entirely natural consequence of fame in the social media age.

One could look at Durant’s career and say that it hasn’t come together the way it was supposed to, with the phenomenal fortune in Golden State and disappointment everywhere else. (By our absurd championship-high expectations, of course.) I’d argue fans are lucky it happened this way. Such great players’ careers are rarely so honest in showing how hard it is to fulfil expectations.