A bold hot take from Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant just gave rivals the Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves
A bold hot take from Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant just gave rivals the Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves added motivation heading into the start of the new season this week.
We are just a couple of days away from the start of the 2025-26 NBA season. Unsurprisingly, the Thunder are early favorites to navigate through a tough Western Conference and get back to the NBA Finals in the spring. However, their opponents in the West Finals, the Timberwolves, are a serious threat. And the Rockets, with new addition Kevin Durant, will be a problem this season.
The trio of teams will face off in many heated matchups this season, and the future Hall of Famer just gave those two contenders bulletin board material with a surprising opinion ahead of NBA opening night on Tuesday.
“You have to score baskets if you want to win a championship. Playing defense, we can get any one of y’all in here to bend your legs, not touch the basketball, slide left and right.”
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) October 19, 2025
– Kevin Durant 👀
(via @netflixsports)
pic.twitter.com/0la4b9FYno
“You have to score baskets if you want to win a championship,” Durant said in an upcoming edition of Netflix series Starting Five. “Playing defense, we can get any one of y’all in here to bend your legs, not touch the basketball, slide left and right, and contest the shot. That’s easy.
“But when we are talking about winning at a high level against the best of the best, you cannot just do that and win basketball games. You have to make shots.”
Kevin Durant is right… and wrong
It is hard to deny what the 15-time NBA All-Star is saying. As much as anyone, he knows what it takes to win at the highest levels after going to four Finals and winning two of them. However, it is just one way to win, but not the only way. The Thunder just proved that last season.
Yes, they had the NBA MVP, but they were not a team overrun with scorers. They won the franchise’s first championship and are a favorite to do it again because they played elite defense. In 2024-25, they were third in the league, giving up just 107.5 points per game. Durant was on a team with star scorers Devin Booker and Bradley Beal last year and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Great defense can overcome a lot of weaknesses elsewhere and take a team to the top. The Timberwolves have young superstar Anthony Edwards, but they made a second straight trip to the West Finals last spring because of, guess what, a defense that gave up just 109.3 points last season. Fifth best in the NBA. Oddly enough, Houston was a top team in 2024-25 because Ime Udoka helped turn them into one of the West’s best defensive teams.
Both the Thunder and Timberwolves will surely be happy to prove the value of elite defense in matchups against the Rockets and Durant this season.
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