Kevin Durant says Draymond Green punch won’t derail Warriors

MILWAUKEE — Kevin Durant knows some of the parallels are there.

From a distance, the Brooklyn Nets‘ star forward has watched — like everybody else — the leaked video footage of Draymond Green punching Golden State Warriors teammate Jordan Poole during practice. The defending champion Warriors’ locker room has been hurt by the incident — and the fact that it became public.

At the beginning of the 2018-19 season, an incident between then-Warriors teammates Durant and Green had a similar type of impact within the framework of the organization — a verbal disagreement that got more heated at the end of a game in early November — which carried over into the locker room and threatened to derail the team’s camaraderie.

Durant and Green ultimately healed their relationship, and the Warriors went about their business, something they’re trying to do again almost four years later in the wake of this latest episode. But as Durant watches the process unfold, he sees a stark difference between then and now.

“That’s not the same situation,” Durant told ESPN. “Somebody got punched in the face … It’s no comparison to that. It was just some words that being — I heard people say that that happens a lot in the NBA. I had never seen nothing like that before. But what me and Draymond did a few years back, that s— happens all the time. So it’s easy to get through something like that, but I don’t know what this situation is like.”

Durant, who played for the Warriors for three seasons and won NBA championships and NBA Finals MVPs in 2017 and 2018, said he has not spoken to Green, who is taking some time away from the team.

Although Durant and Poole, who was drafted by the Warriors in 2019, never crossed paths as Golden State teammates, they have built up a bit of a relationship thanks to their shared relationship with multiple members of the Warriors coaching staff. Durant noted, however, that his friendship with Poole is not “to the point where I can text him or call him and talk to him about it.”

“It seems cool, everybody’s back to normal,” Durant said. “Draymond is playing next game, Jordan was playing last game. So I guess it’s back to normal. Anything around our sport that doesn’t just involve the game of basketball — once it gets to that type of stuff, I try to stay away from it. It has nothing to do with anybody else but those people in the locker room.”

While the clear difference is that Durant and Green never exchanged punches during their 2018 verbal…