Former NBA champion Kendrick Perkins opened about the problems that the Oklahoma City Thunder faced and that prevented the team from winning a championship despite having superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook on the roster.
According to him, the main problem wasn’t OKC trading James Harden to the Houston Rockets, instead it was lack of relationship between KD and Russ.
Perkins revealed that the brotherhood that the two superstars showed publicly was fake. They were never close off the court. He knew it back then that with that kind of relationship the Thunder will not win a championship.
However, Perkins did try to make Durant and Westbrook communicate more and spend time together, but he admits it never really worked.
“It was all about KD and Russ,” Perk said on The Old Mad & The Three podcast. “It was about their relationship. That continuity wasn’t there. No matter how much they tried to fake it to the public, their brotherhood it never was a brotherhood and that’s okay, right?
“Because you don’t have to be somebody’s brother to go out there and try to win a championship, but it helps. But they never just got on the same page and it was the most difficult situation I’ve ever been in.
“Coming from a Celtic team that was so close, that when I got to the Oklahoma City Thunder it was so separated. You had Eric Maynor, you had Russell Westbrook, and James Harden those guys all and DaeQuan Cook they had a clique and they kicked it with each other.
“And then you just had KD who was just by himself and he didn’t even hang with them. So I started to see it and I’m like ‘Hold on, we can’t win like this, not where we trying to go.'”
