Kevin Durant Says ‘My Season Is Over. I Don’t Plan On Playing At All’

Go ahead and forget about Kevin Durant suiting up this summer for the Brooklyn Nets.

Durant won’t play when the NBA restarts its season in Orlando next month, he told Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated.

“My season is over,” Durant said. “I don’t plan on playing at all. We decided last summer when it first happened that I was just going to wait until the following season. I had no plans of playing at all this season.”

The Nets are currently the No. 7 seed in the East and one of 22 teams involved in the NBA restart in Orlando’s Walt Disney World approved this week.

Durant said he’s uncertain if he will join the Nets in Orlando.

“That is a decision we are still making,” he said. “I still got some time to make it. As of right now, I am enjoying the routine I am on.”

Durant’s teammate Kyrie Irving has also been working out, but reportedly said he may join the Nets in Orlando only as an inactive player.

On June 11, Durant will be a year removed from the Achilles tear he suffered in the NBA Finals with the Warriors. He won’t suit up again until the 2020-21 season, which is now slated to begin Dec. 1. Durant said he’s looking forward to suiting up for Brooklyn for the first time.

“It will mean a lot,” he said. “I’m excited. I can’t wait to play the game again and be out there with my new team working for a goal that we all want to accomplish. Learning from my experiences, my thought process on the experiences overall and my advice and knowledge from being an NBA player, I’m just looking forward to it all. The new challenge of ahead of me is what I’m excited about.”

Durant was one of four Nets to test positive for COVID-19 in March, but says he’s fully recovered now.

“I feel good,” he said. “I didn’t have any symptoms so I am good. I couldn’t leave the house. I knew things would change. The unknown was definitely difficult to deal with. But other than that, I was great.”

Like everyone else, Durant has been following the racial unrest and protests across America triggered by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers Minneapolis.

A number of current and former NBA players, from Stephen Jackson to Jaylen Brown to Dennis Smith Jr. to Enes Kanter have been involved in protests.

“Obviously, players are stepping up making it a conversation whether it’s powerful and peaceful protests in their cities, organizing things, programs and pouring back into their communities,” he said. “They’re using their platforms to tell stories. The state of the world is an evolving conversation that is ever flowing. It is moving in the right direction. This is all we wanted is to see justice for George Floyd and others wrongfully done by the police. But also have a conversation shaping hearts and minds about black people in general. The conversation is moving in a direction of hopefully seeing change.”