It wasn’t the ending that Kevin Durant — or the rest of the Suns — expected when the star arrived from the Nets at the 2023 trade deadline.
They weren’t expecting a postseason exit this early, with a 125-100 loss in Game 6 on Thursday securing their second-round defeat against the top-seeded Nuggets.
And in the end, in the final loss where Denver exploded for 81 points in the first half, Durant said it “sucked.”
“It was a bad feeling,” Durant told reporters at his postgame press conference.
“It was embarrassing. They came out and hit us in the mouth, and we couldn’t recover. We gotta give them credit for being a disciplined team.”
It marked the end of a three-month stretch where Durant was traded from the Nets and then missed three weeks due to an ankle injury sustained in the Suns’ warmups on March 8.
But when asked whether that contributed to the Suns’ early exit, Durant said that he didn’t want to provide additional context since “it would just be looked at as an excuse.”
Instead, Durant said the Suns just need to be better last year, though the exact construction of that team — still searching for the first NBA title in franchise history — remains uncertain.
ESPN reported that Phoenix could “aggressively explore” trade scenarios for starting center DeAndre Ayton, who missed the season-ending Game 6 loss with a rib injury and was also benched in Game 3.
“It’s hard right now to see what the future will hold for our team, but we got a good foundation, good infrastructure we could build on and move on from this and learn from it, get better from it,” Durant said Thursday. “It’s a hard question to answer right now. I’m sure that as the summer and offseason starts to progress, we’ll figure that out a little bit more.”
In eight regular-season games with the Suns, Durant averaged 26.0 points and 6.4 rebounds per game, and those numbers increased to 29.0 and 8.7, respectively, across 11 playoff games against the Clippers and Nuggets.
Denver advanced to the Western Conference final and will face the winner of the Lakers and Warriors, which meet Friday night for Game 6 with Los Angeles leading the series, 3-2.