Kevin Durant’s Mom Jokes He ‘Would’ve Had 20 Rings’ If He Stayed With Warriors

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
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It’s not just NBA fans wondering what would have happened if Kevin Durant stayed with the Golden State Warriors. His mom thinks about it, too.

Wanda Durant starred in the latest episode of the docuseries Raising Fame, in which she briefly touched upon Durant’s short stint in the Bay Area. Durant teamed up with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson for three dynasty-defining seasons from 2016 to '19, reaching the NBA Finals in each campaign and winning two NBA championships during that span. 

Despite Durant’s injury-plagued final season with the Warriors, his mom admitted she didn’t want him to leave Golden State at the time and gave a lofty, though exaggerated, prediction for what could have happened if he had stayed instead. 

“Sonya, you and I, we were in the thicket together for a few years,” Durant told Sonya Curry, Steph’s mother, on the show. “I ain’t really want him to go either… Man, we would've had 20 rings by now. And it was about 10 years ago. That's how cold they were.”

In his last season in Golden State, Durant suffered a ruptured Achilles in the 2019 NBA Finals against the Toronto Raptors, and the Warriors ended up falling tantalizingly short of a historic three-peat, losing 2-4 in the series. 

Durant has since hopped from the Warriors to the Brooklyn Nets’ failed superteam experiment to the Phoenix Suns, where he has won just one playoff series in the last two years. The Suns were swept by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round this past postseason. 

Durant and Curry linked up for what could be the final time in this summer’s 2024 Paris Olympics, which culminated in a watershed moment for both NBA icons’ respective careers. Curry made an indelible mark in his Team USA debut as one of the coldest shooters the Games has ever seen while Durant became the first player in Olympic men’s basketball history to win four gold medals.

If the two all-time greats don’t share a court again, at least they have this: the feeling of winning Olympic gold and sharing one last title together, for old times’ sake.


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Kristen Wong
KRISTEN WONG

Kristen Wong is a staff writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. She has been a sports journalist since 2020. Before joining SI in November 2023, Wong covered four NFL teams as an associate editor with the FanSided NFL Network and worked as a staff writer for the brand’s flagship site. Outside of work, she has dreams of running her own sporty dive bar.