The Houston Rockets are trading for Kevin Durant, according to ESPN. The deal will send Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the No. 10 pick in this week’s draft and five second-round pick to the Phoenix Suns in a blockbuster deal, per the report. Durant, entering his 18th NBA season, will now join his fifth NBA team after stints with the Oklahoma City Thunder, Golden State Warriors, Brooklyn Nets and the Suns.
The Suns acquired Durant at the 2023 trade deadline with much fanfare. Mat Ishbia had just taken over the team and he wanted to make a splash, so he traded control of five first-round picks along with Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson and Jae Crowder to get the 2014 MVP. However, the move was not enough to give Ishbia the contender he craved. The Suns lost in the second round to the Denver Nuggets in 2023. They were swept by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round in 2024. Then, this season, they missed the postseason all together.
Rumors of Durant’s availability at the deadline came seemingly out of nowhere at the deadline. His Suns had spent months trying and failing to trade Bradley Beal for Jimmy Butler. Therefore, with the deadline nearing, they took a different approach. They attempted to trade Durant back to the Warriors in a three-team deal that would have brought in assets from Golden State and Butler from the Warriors.
The only problem? Durant didn’t want to return to the team with whom he won his two championships. That scuttled the deal. Other teams sniffed around at the deadline, but Durant seemingly preferred to finish the season in Phoenix and figure out his future later.
“Me going into your team in the middle of the season it’s going to be a big blow to any team I’m going to,” Durant said at the time. “I get why you want to trade me, simple fact that’s just business. But for me looking at it, it just doesn’t make sense for either side to go through that when we could just play the season out and if that’s the decision you want to make in the offseason then you figure it out.”
So Durant finished the campaign in Phoenix and then got traded hours before the final game of the season. Durant’s first team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, are playing for their first title in OKC and hosting the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the Finals on Sunday night. Durant himself was on-stage at the Fanatics Fest in New York when the news broke Sunday afternoon.
The season was a success individually for Durant, but at 36 years old, signs of slippage started to seep in for the first time. Durant was still an All-Star selection last season, and his shooting numbers looked mostly the same. But he gets to the basket less than he did at his peak. His free-throw rate in Phoenix was only 31%, down from a career figure of 39.4%. Most of the all-in-one metrics at this stage peg him as a very, very good player, but not quite the MVP he was at his peak.
Further complicating a possible trade was the reality that Durant, on an expiring contract, held some measure of control over the proceedings. No team would give up a substantial asset package for him if he didn’t want to play for them. Durant laid the foundation for this soon after the deadline. “I want my career to end on my terms. That’s the only thing,” he said. That prevented an all-out bidding war and with it any hopes the Suns had of recouping a package similar to the one they paid for Durant at the 2023 trade deadline.
Fortunately, there was still a fair amount of interests that seemingly appealed to Durant. At the trade deadline, it was reported that five teams held mutual interest with Durant in a possible deal: Houston, San Antonio, Minnesota, Miami and New York. When the offseason arrived, those five teams were unsurprisingly at the front of the line, and sure enough, Durant wound up landing with one of the teams on that list. The Raptors, for what it’s worth, were also reportedly in the mix.
But the Rockets are the team that probably made the most basketball sense from the start. Last year, Houston had a suffocating defense and got by on offense thanks to its athleticism in transition and its incredible offensive rebounding. But generating good shots in the half court proved a major challenge, and that was ultimately what doomed the Rockets in the playoffs.
Few players in NBA history have been better at generating clean looks for themselves than Durant. He is exactly the sort of half-court bucket-generator that the Rockets lacked last season, and in Houston, he reunites with Ime Udoka, who coached him in Brooklyn on Steve Nash’s staff, and Royal Ivey, an assistant on Udoka’s staff who is both a former teammate and assistant coach of Durant’s. All parties involved here knew what a clean fit this would be, and now, after earning a No. 2 seed in the 2024-25 season, the Rockets have found their offensive centerpiece.
