Bickley Blast: Will Phoenix Suns, Kevin Durant have classy departure or messy divorce?

Bickley Blast: Will Phoenix Suns, Kevin Durant have classy departure or messy divorce?

and marada mornings arizona sports the local sports leader big league blast like him or not kevin durant has handled his final chapter in phoenix with a lot of class and a lot of professionalism will that change in the near future will he become an obstructionist to a potential deal with minnesota or toronto forcing the suns to take a lesser offer elsewhere and how will fans feel if the suns get fleeced because durant wouldn’t play for a team that reached the western conference finals two years running will durant become the enemy in phoenix subject to the same kind of treatment he currently gets in oklahoma city either way it’s becoming quite clear this divorce might get messy now can the suns talk kd into going to minnesota i’m guessing no in fact mark spears just reported that anthony edwards is not going to get involved and attempt to change kd’s mind and if kd doesn’t want the timberwolves i’m guessing he’s not changing his mind about toronto so what can the suns do to get houston or san antonio to come correct maybe the suns need to announce that this isn’t the final chapter that kd is off the market and part of their team moving forward that will give them something to think about if the suns have the stomach for that kind of highstakes poker all right today’s bickley blast brought to you by my great friends at chapman bmw who make luxury attainable find them online at chapmanbmw.com ant-man and you were in olympics we were there katie and ant-man were joined at the hip the whole time so i think a lot of people are wondering is ant-man trying to recruit him is what is he doing i heard ant-man’s in atlanta working on his game eating lemon pepper wings he he he’s not involved he’s not trying to change his mind he’s been to western conference two times in a row the team’s really good so if katie doesn’t want to come i think he’s respecting that and don’t expect him to fly to la to try to change his mind come on ant don’t you want to play with your idol i’m sure anthony edwards is is very uh not happy about this but i i also don’t think anthony edwards sees himself as an inferior to the point where he’s going to go begging for kevin durant no no um man we haven’t heard about lemon pepper wings in atlanta since lemon pepper wings yeah how about it williams the lemon pepper wings dream dream city what was something like that mhm uh lemon pepper the lemon pepper wings um look they say in life don’t ever meet your heroes i wonder if there’s an element from anthony edwards look i love the guy he’s my favorite player of all time do i want to play with him do i want to jeopardize what i feel and think about kevin durant i don’t know i think everything’s on the table right now but yeah for anthony edwards not trying to recruit which recruitment is a big thing in today’s nba and in all professional sports when uh when there’s somebody that’s available that happens now you’re pulling him off the market making the announcement you’d have to have i really you’d have to have an iron stomach an iron nerve to do something like that yeah but it but it would it would change the dynamics it would change the calculus because then kd would have to declare whether he’s cool with that well you create scarcity you create scarcity you create urgency uh-huh if anthony edwards were just kind of hellbent on recruiting kd getting him to minnesota i want to play with my uh favorite player and he was verbal about that to minnesota then i think there would be a lot more push from their camp to be like “sons what what would it take for you to kind of look the other way with durant’s feelings?” yeah but remember your perception after minnesota got eliminated in the western conference finals you thought anthony edwards response was kind of a kind of a lz fair like i’m going to get back here again i’m not a different set of cats broken up better things are coming and you kind speculated oh he knew kd was on the way and this flies in the face of that which i find interesting yeah or or maybe maybe he was expecting the timberwolves to make that happen and he never even fathom that kd wouldn’t be willing to come there because minnesota was involved at the trade deadline last season mhm so to me yeah i so i don’t know how they’re going to generate leverage that is a way to do it if you if you kind of say “okay you know what we’re going to you’d have to really play it off though.” well because then then then you’re going to get katie’s attention and then maybe they get worried are they serious are they really going to run it back that might be the end result in this whole thing but maybe not by choice and i want to play this again for you this is brian windhorse from espn appearing on a radio show on espn cleveland it’s a real starown you know desmond bane got traded for four first round picks and i see people saying “oh my god if desmond bane gets traded for four first round picks kevin durant’s got to be get you got to get six first round picks.” no you’re not going to get that great of a package because the team paying for it isn’t sure what durant’s going to do necessarily and the teams that durant wants to go to houston and san antonio for example they’re lary of give paying a huge amount for a 37 year old their whole teams are in their early to mid20s right you know so you don’t have alignment in making everybody getting on the same page you know what durant wants what the suns need what the teams want to pay right with the contract i would not rule out the suns not being able to get a trade they like and having to make a decision like do we not trade him at all and i wonder if that i wonder if that is a possibility people and we played the sound from from tony cornheiser describing kevin durant as miserable i wouldn’t characterize it at that no he even after the trade deadline i think he was he was kevin durant he played good basketball after the trade deadline when all that weirdness happened and i remember him being interviewed saying and somebody prefaced the question by “hey have you been through this before?” and he corrected them and said “no i’ve never been through this before.” i forgot about that not you know being dangled at the trade deadline without my knowing that that’s never happened before but he conducted himself as a professional he did and i wonder if god forbid they go down that road and they explore all these possibilities with all these teams and work with kevin durant and rich klein and they can’t come to any kind of conclusion is this is this workable moving forward i don’t i don’t know if it is this is why this is why um the strategy shift in my blast might be really their only option but they’d have to be convincing about it because again if the houston rockets have put together a patch a package that they want to trade for kevin durant it means they’ve had a lot of discussions internally they’ve probably talked to team leaders they’ve created a lot of internal excitement about getting kevin durant would they let all that go over a reed shepard would they let all that go over a single asset in the trade only if they believe the suns are going to walk away from the the deal that’s on the table right you’ve got to be able to walk away from a deal and mean it if you are going to get better terms and and i think in the case of here i don’t know what’s going to get houston to budge but the fact that they’ve got an offer on the table tells you they are interested yeah and so that might have to be the way you play this thing because a wild scenario in which durant does not get traded this off seasonason him playing basketball for the phoenix suns would a be mind-blowing for me and that we didn’t make a trade and b also it immediately becomes now what are you going to do with him are you going to let him play out his contract are you going to try to trade him at the deadline for maybe houston comes to the again realization they have no one to score the ball in the fourth quarter and then they throw in that asset y at the deadline teams will panic that is also an incredibly risky proposition for the kevin durant side of things at age 37 to not have a contract passed this year mhm i think honestly if it got to that point where it’s such a stalemate that list of of locations that kevin durant would be interested in playing in would grow yes maybe and and maybe that’s the path to get minnesota um to get kevin durant to change his mind it’s so we can expect to be talking about this until september is what you’re saying wow that’d be nightmare fuel right hey we talked about the we talked about the possibility of a kevin durant trade to phoenix for almost a calendar year mhm so oh you’re right about that what’s going to last longer the speculation about the kevin durant trade coming or the kevin durant trade going i just had another thought too cuz we we we got a lot of time to piece all these things together the list of kevin durant destinations that he prefers houston san antonio miami we talked about the weather uh factor we talked about the no state tax factor mhm how about the fact that all three of those organizations already have multiple championships so that pressure to come in and elevate is not necessarily as high as it would be for a minnesota or i mean toronto’s got one but not multiple championships i don’t know just something to think about yeah the other thing real real quickly and i’m sure you saw this as well some clarity has come out of the new york situation as why did the knicks didn’t want kevin durant apparently james dolan is still angry at kd because he really thought kd and kyrie were coming in the summer of what would have been when they went to brooklyn instead 2019 2019 okay it was 19 yeah yeah and that sounds perfectly james dolanesque get over it and kd at at that point in time said the knicks are corny well they were they were no you’re right they were they kind of were thanks for watching bickley and marada click to see the latest bickley blast and hit the button in the middle to subscribe to arizona sports

As Kevin Durant’s time with the Phoenix Suns draws closer to an end, Dan Bickley considers how the future hall of famer has handled the closing of this chapter with class but wonders if a messy divorce is on the horizon.

More from Dan Bickley, Suns owe Kevin Durant nothing when searching for trade partner: https://arizonasports.com/dan-bickley/suns-owe-durant-nothing/3587285/

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