Durant has seemed miserable all season long in Oakland.
Having watched the Warriors closely all year — paying special attention to KD's body language — this feels like an oversimplification. There have definitely been moments throughout the year where he has seemed weirdly sad, to the point where I've wondered if he's dealing with depression. But, you know ... people get sad. I have no idea how much any of the presumed externalities armchair psychologists like to float (Draymond is mean to him, it's not "his team," Ws fans love Steph more, e.g.) have to do with his occasionally looking depressed. Nor does Simmons, Bucher or anyone else.
I can say that over the last month or so, his body language has looked a whole lot more cheerful, even after losses. The presser after the "Steph mocks Kogut" loss may have been the cheeriest I've seen him all year, off-court, anyway. And on court, he's looked even more lively and engaged than usual lately, viz. the last game where he dropped 21 in 21 minutes, including an array of vicious off-the-dribble dunks and high-flying chasedown blocks, punctuated by very engaged-looked primal screams.
Obviously I've got my own pro-Warrior biases, but I also think there's a ton of anti-Warrior bias and confirmation bias in the "KD is miserable" narrative. We get 50,000 recycled comments anytime he shows bad body language or says something that could be construed as unhappy, and nary a peep when he says something like this just the other day:
Meanwhile, actual friends and former teammates of KD like Matt Barnes and David West, when consulted, have tended to laugh off the whole "KD hates it in Oakland" storyline as largely media-created nonsense.
Bucher's latest recycling of the storyline seems particularly stale and disingenuous, given that he delivered it with a bunch of other crusty old Warrior memes and clichés that are either false or outdated: Iguodala and Green are playing horribly, they're significantly worse at defense than last year, they all clearly don't like each other, etc. Bucher's basically a CHB-style hater from the bad old Warrior days who called the firing of Mark Jackson racist, said Curry will never be a real PG, etc. He went from one of the 3-4 best-known Warrior insiders pre-Lacob to total exile from Warrior island. Massive grain of salt for his lame attempts to lob feces over the walls of the golden kingdom he's now locked out of.
Anyway, Bucher aside, and Warrior team drama aside, color me skeptical that KD going to play for James Dolan (whom he has described a "hapless moron," per Rich Kleiman) is a "done deal."