Kevin Durant didn’t hold back when addressing recent claims that foreign-born players are dominating the NBA’s MVP race because of superior training systems abroad.

As reported by Dana Scott of The Arizona Republic, Durant responded forcefully to the idea that the rise of international stars is the result of a fundamentally better development approach overseas.

This conversation gained traction after Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a Canadian-born guard, was named the NBA’s 2025 Most Valuable Player, becoming the latest in a line of non-American players to claim the league’s highest individual honor.

His win extends an ongoing trend: for seven straight seasons, the MVP has gone to an international player.

The streak began in 2019 with Giannis Antetokounmpo of Greece, who won back-to-back awards, followed by Serbia’s Nikola Jokić with two more, then Joel Embiid of Cameroon in 2023, and Jokić once again in 2024.

This year, Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokić, and Antetokounmpo made up the top three vote-getters, continuing the international dominance of the award. The last American-born player to win MVP was James Harden in 2018.

Durant, the 2014 MVP and one of the most respected voices in the game, took to Twitter to push back on the idea that American training has fallen behind.

In response to a tweet from Robert Littal, co-founder of Black Sports Online, Durant labeled the notion as simplistic and divisive.

“Most of these successful international guys either are influenced heavily by American basketball culture, played high school ball in America, some even went to college here,” Durant wrote.

“This whole convo is trash, basketball is a universal language, some people have different dialect. Some states teach the game different than other states, who says there’s a perfect way to teach the game?”

Littal’s remarks stemmed from the Netflix documentary Court of Gold, which explores global basketball cultures ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics.

The film draws a contrast between the highly structured, demanding training methods of European coaches and what it portrays as a more relaxed, less disciplined American youth development system.

Littal concluded his comments by saying, “We have become a soft country,” a sentiment that seemed to particularly irk Durant.

Rather than framing the discussion as American versus international development, Durant emphasized the global nature of the game and rejected the idea that there is only one correct way to teach basketball.

For him, the diversity of styles and training philosophies is not a weakness, but a reflection of basketball’s evolution into a truly international sport.

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