Kevin Durant's return to the 2019 NBA Finals didn't last long as he suffered an Achilles injury early in the second quarter of Game 5.
While the severity of the injury is waiting to be confirmed via an MRI, the belief is he has a torn right Achilles tendon. The seriousness of the injury caused many Warriors fans to become upset, and even led to Warriors GM Bob Myers giving a tearful injury update at the end of the game.
All of this plays into just how awful it was to see several Raptors fans in the arena celebrate Durant's injury.
Kyle Lowry and the Warriors tell fans to stop cheering as Kevin Durant walks off with an injury. pic.twitter.com/UldE49bF22
— ESPN (@espn) June 11, 2019
MORE: Kevin Durant posts message following his injury
In the video above, not only can you hear cheering, but you can see multiple fans gleefully waving goodbye to Durant. Players on both sides were obviously frustrated by this on the court, and after the game they expressed their feelings more in depth. Let's go through some of the Warriors who had some opinions.
Steph Curry:
"I'm very confused around that reaction. It's not my experience with people of this city and I commend, obviously, Danny Green and Kyle Lowry, especially. I think they were the (Raptors players) that were kind of signalling to the crowd like, 'OK, let's check each other a little bit and understand this is about an individual human being and not, 'Oh, shoot. He's out. We won the championship.'
"Like that was probably their initial thought, and you hate to see that when a guy's going through pain like that. Again, that's not my experience with this city, and I just hope that ugliness doesn’t show itself again as we go forward in this series."
Klay Thompson:
“It was bulls—. That was freaking ridiculous. I can’t even put into words how mad I was about that.”
Draymond Green:
"That's crazy. That's crazy. Come on ... that's classless. For me, I've always witnessed Canadians being the nicest people that I've ever encountered, and that was classless."
DeMarcus Cousins:
“F— them. F— 'em. Trash. So trash. We’re all idolized as superstar athletes. We're not human beings. It's always about what we can do between those lines. That's it. That's all that ever matters."
It seems like one of the few Raptors fans who actually acted appropriately was Drake.
Drake consoled Kevin Durant as he walked off in the second quarter. pic.twitter.com/05ZpHdL49l
— ESPN (@espn) June 11, 2019
As for the other side, the Raptors players were also upset with their own fans for how they reacted. Kyle Lowry tried to come up with an explanation as to why some fans reacted the way they did.
"I don't think the fans knew the significance of the injury," Lowry said. "They kind of just seen he went down. In this league, we're all brothers. At the end of the day, we're all brothers and it's a small brotherhood and you never want to see a competitor like him go down. You don't know what the circumstances are. We don't want anything to ever happen like that. We don't know what's this or that. We don't want that type of stuff. And it didn't change much emotionally. It was just after he went down, and we got on and finished the game."
Durant scored 11 points on 3-of-5 shooting in 12 minutes before exiting the game.
