National Basketball Association

Billy Donovan shares his insight on Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook's relationship

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:12 p.m. ET

Andrew Lynch

With Kevin Durant long gone and Russell Westbrook staying loyal, Oklahoma City Thunder coach Billy Donovan had an opportunity to throw KD under the bus. Instead, he took the classy route in a recent podcast interview with Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski.

In a lengthy discussion that focused mostly on KD and Westbrook, Donovan made it very clear that if there was ever any animosity between the two superstars, he didn't see it.

Via Yahoo.com:

Going into the season, you hear so much talk about how their relationship is, or what it is and what it's not. And one of the things I wanted to do was just come in there very, very much drawing my own opinions or conclusions of things, because I really didn't want to take a lot of history of different things. Because to your point — you're exactly right, I could go back and watch a game on TV and there could be players discussing or maybe it looks like they're arguing over something and people can draw the conclusion, "Well, they don't get along."

I did not experience anything like that and didn't see anything like that.

If Donovan had stopped there, we'd all have to take his comments with a grain of salt. When the tension rises in the heat of competition, even teammates can have a tendency to get right in each other's faces — something Donovan admitted would happen from time to time with KD and Westbrook. According to Donovan, however, those moments were simply the product of wanting to win.

Certainly, during the course of heated moments, any players can get into it a little bit. And as you mentioned, they both want the same thing, but maybe they're going about it differently, so to speak. I think with Russell and Kevin, both those guys wanted to win at a very, very high level, and I think they had a really, really good relationship. I don't think there's any question about that.

I think being able to talk to those guys, being able to bring them both in together, being able to communicate with both of them — I thought from my experience, since I never had any situations where, "Jeez, we've got a problem here this week. These two guys are just totally on two ends of the spectrum and they're refusing to work together."

That never happened at all. I think those two guys really wanted to compete and win at the highest of levels.

Unfortunately, that desire to win boiled over from time to time, as it did against the Spurs in the Western Conference playoffs this season:

Again, that's kind of the point. People saw Westbrook and KD have some passionate conversations and decided that the two must hate each other — particularly since they're both ball-dominant scorers who didn't fit together as well as you might hope.

I suppose it doesn't particularly matter at this point, however. Durant's in Golden State. Westbrook chose to stick around in Oklahoma City. And we can't wait for the first time they meet.