Kevin Durant Reflects on Best Teams: Warriors vs. Nets

Kevin Durant has never been afraid of a microphone or a little smoke, and his latest trip down memory lane managed to stir up both the Bay and Brooklyn in the span of a single conversation.

Sitting down with Boardroom, Durant was asked a simple question with a loaded history: What’s the best team, on paper, he’s ever played on?

He didn’t say Golden State. Not at first.

Durant went straight to Brooklyn.

He started rolling through the names like an All-Star roll call: Kyrie Irving, James Harden, Blake Griffin, LaMarcus Aldridge, Paul Millsap, Patty Mills. Layer that group on top of Durant himself and you get a roster that, in terms of résumés and reputation, looked like a fantasy draft.

“We had the names on that team,” Durant said, summing up the appeal of that Nets era in one line.

It was the same logic he used a few weeks earlier when he claimed the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers were more talented on paper than the championship Warriors teams he helped turn into a juggernaut.

This time, he went a step further and explained why those Warriors squads didn’t immediately come to mind.

He acknowledged what everyone else was already thinking: people would point straight to Golden State and say, “You had Steph and Klay.” But Durant dug into the timeline. Stephen Curry was already an MVP, yet Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, he argued, hadn’t fully built out their awards cabinets at that stage.

“At the time,” Durant noted, they were “like one-time All-Stars,” not the fully formed Hall of Fame cases we see now. The Nets veterans he mentioned, by contrast, had largely stacked up their accolades before joining him in Brooklyn. Many were closer to the back end of their careers, arriving with All-Star nods, All-NBA mentions and reputations already cemented.

“So when you’re just putting accolades on the table,” Durant said, that Nets group, in his mind, edged it.

That line of thinking didn’t just tweak Warriors fans. It seemed to brush Klay Thompson the wrong way as well, given how fiercely that Golden State core guards its legacy.

Then came the twist.

After the clip circulated and the debate flared up again, Durant took another look at his own history and realized he’d left out a pretty important piece of the puzzle.

“Obviously, the best team I played on was the Warriors,” he admitted.

Not just any Warriors team, either. He zeroed in on the 2018-19 group, the one that never quite got to show its full power in June.

“I want to say the 2019 team was crazy, but we got hurt. With Cousins at the five, that’s probably the best team I’ve been a part of on paper.”

That one detail changed everything. DeMarcus Cousins.

Durant said the reason that roster didn’t immediately jump into his mind was simple: he barely shared the floor with Cousins that year. Cousins missed a big chunk of the 2018-19 season with injury, and Durant himself went down in the playoffs. The version of that team that existed “on paper” rarely appeared in reality.

“I forgot about Cuz,” Durant admitted. “I didn’t play with Cuz a lot that year, because he got hurt. But when you look at it on paper, it’s probably, yeah.”

A fully healthy Warriors lineup featuring Curry, Thompson, Durant, Green and Cousins is the sort of thing that sounds like a video game glitch. For Durant, once he factored Cousins back into the equation, the debate was over. Golden State on top. Brooklyn right behind.

“That Brooklyn team is a close second,” he added, leaving just enough room for the Nets’ what-if to linger.

That “what-if” still clearly bothers him. Durant said he regrets not being able to deliver a title in Brooklyn, not because of the narrative around his career, but because he understood what a championship in that city, with that group, would have felt like. He talked about the atmosphere he knew they could have created if they’d managed to stay healthy, stay aligned, and finish the job.

The Warriors got the parades. The Nets got the headlines. Durant played for both, and he’s still sorting through which version of his basketball life meant the most on paper.

On the court, the verdict is settled in banners. Off it, the argument clearly isn’t going away any time soon.