Sunday 7 June 2020 09:55, UK
Kevin Durant won't play for the Brooklyn Nets if the 2019-20 NBA season resumes.
''My season is over,'' Durant told Marc J Spears of The Undefeated. ''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.''
Durant ruptured his right Achilles tendon in last season's Finals as a member of the Golden State Warriors. He has not played an NBA game since June 10, 2019.
The Warriors would go on to lose that series in six games to the Toronto Raptors, and Durant departed this past summer in free agency for the Brooklyn Nets.
While Durant was progressing during his rehab with the Nets, the team will take a cautious approach as the NBA gets set to return. Durant was participating in 5-on-5 scrimmages in March, but has not played to that level since after the season was shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Shortly after the 2019-20 was suspended, Durant revealed he was one of the first NBA players to test positive for coronavirus.
"I was shocked. And then I was curious," Durant told The Undefeated when asked about getting the diagnosis. "I wanted to know what it meant. What is the virus about? I started to get information about it more and more. It calmed me down. I was just more curious [as] to what I was dealing with and how I could fight it myself."
Durant is expected to be ready to participate in training camp for next season.
Because of the delayed ending to the 2019-20 season, next season's training camps will start in November, with the 2020-21 season set to start on December 1.
Durant, 31, is a two-time NBA champion and won his lone MVP award in 2013-14.
He has averaged 27.0 points and 7.1 rebounds over 12 seasons (849 games) with the Seattle SuperSonics, Oklahoma City Thunder and the Warriors. He has led the NBA in scoring four times, most recently in 2013-14 with the Thunder, when he averaged 32.0 points per game.
