Kevin Durant reflects on eight seasons in Oklahoma City before Rockets visit

The return

Kevin Durant and the Houston Rockets play the Thunder on Oct. 31, the first meeting between the teams this season. The game arrives a day after ESPN published an interview with Durant about the city he left a decade ago.

The interview, with ESPN's David Seronick for the E60 documentary "The Oklahoma Standard," covers Durant's eight seasons in Oklahoma City, the 2012 Finals and the Thunder's 2025 championship. The film is about the team's connection to the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum.

"I really, really am grateful to be an alumni of the Thunder and to help kick-start this thing off with a lot of my teammates," Durant said. Durant said it is amazing to see, that playing against those teams is tough for him as a player, and that he still carries a soft spot in his heart for the state.

The film takes its name from the term for the collective response by the community after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. ESPN said the documentary details the Thunder's connection to the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, and the interview excerpts that ran with the story focus on what the team meant to a city rebuilding its public identity.

Durant also described the reception after the 2012 Finals, when the Thunder lost to Miami. He said the city held what amounted to a small parade for a team that had lost. "So many people came and welcomed us back home and showed us so much love and congratulated us on a great season." He said that response told him what a championship parade would look like years before one happened.

Arriving in 2008

Durant arrived in July 2008, at 19, in his second NBA season, as the face of a franchise that had just moved from Seattle. The team had been selected second in the 2007 draft by the SuperSonics and played eight seasons in Oklahoma City.

He described the welcome as immediate, with the excitement and energy level high. He described the team as young and in rebuilding mode, and said nobody would have guessed that from the way the city welcomed them.

The city had hosted the New Orleans Hornets temporarily after Hurricane Katrina displaced that team in 2005. For Oklahoma City, Durant said, having its own team meant something more than basketball. He said it was finally a way to get out of that dark cloud of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The memorial visit

Durant said Sam Presti, the general manager, insisted that players understand the city's history. He recalled being taken to the site of the 1995 bombing and told what residents had been through.

"It was powerful," Durant said. "And [the city] has a special place in my heart because of the tragedy it'd been through." He said the visit changed what putting on the jersey meant: He said the players did not realize at the time that they were forming a new culture for the entire state.

He compared Oklahoma City with larger markets he later played in. "You got plays, you got Broadway," he said of those cities. In Oklahoma City, he said, the Thunder game was what people had to do, and he imagined small towns shutting down to watch.

The Finals and the split

The Thunder reached the NBA Finals in their fourth season in Oklahoma City with Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, all future MVPs. They lost the 2012 Finals to the Miami Heat, and that core never returned to the Finals together.

Durant left for Golden State in 2016 and won consecutive championships and Finals MVPs with the Warriors. Some in Oklahoma City viewed the departure with acrimony, and he has been booed at times on return visits.

The Thunder eventually finished what that group could not. Oklahoma City won the 2025 title, and Durant said he felt the parade would be enormous before it happened. He said he wished that Thunder team could have been the one to do it, because they were young and had shown they could. "But I felt the sense of pride of being an alumni of the Thunder, seeing this team win as well, because I felt that's the evolution of what we did."

The player he is now

Durant is a 19-year veteran in his second season with Houston. Through five games he is taking 12.6 shots a game, a career low, and the Rockets are 5-0, their best start in more than a decade.

That balance is the point. Houston's offense no longer needs Durant to initiate every possession or score 30 for the team to win. He is averaging 34.4 minutes, two fewer than last season, and Yahoo Sports noted he has been the Rockets' best shot blocker so far.

He called it one of the most special things he can say he has been part of. Durant said of watching the franchise grow. "You don't get to be at the infant stages of a lot of things and to see it blossom to where it is now."

Our report on Houston's 5-0 start covers the wins behind that record. The national viewing guide lists where the Rockets and Thunder appear this season, and our opening-week viewership report covers how the league's first week was watched.