Wall believes a coaching change was required after a disappointing 41-41 campaign and that Brooks is the right fit for the franchise. And he wants to make one thing clear: Brooks is coming to Washington, first and foremost, to coach the Wizards. Not to lure Kevin Durant.

“We signed Scotty Brooks to win an NBA championship,” Wall said in a phone interview Friday night. “We didn’t sign Scotty Brooks to say, ‘Okay, Scotty, go get him. You got to bring us Kevin Durant.’ We got Scotty Brooks because we feel like he can help John Wall and make him a better player and make our team get to the next step. We didn’t get Scotty Brooks just to get Kevin Durant. That’s not what Scott is on board to do. And I hope everybody doesn’t expect just because we got Scotty Brooks, he’s automatically going to get K.D., he’s going to automatically jump.”

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Wall said he was made aware that Wizards President Ernie Grunfeld and Vice President Tommy Sheppard would interview Brooks, but that he was not closely involved with the process.

The Wizards will pursue Durant, an impending unrestricted free agent, this summer. There is no doubt. They have deliberately crafted their payroll over the previous two years to ensure there would be enough cap space to sign the Washington area native.

Consequently, the 50-year-old Brooks’s connection with Durant cannot be overlooked. The two spent eight seasons together – Brooks was an assistant during Durant’s rookie campaign with the Seattle SuperSonics before the franchise moved to Oklahoma City the following year, when Brooks took over for P.J. Carlislemo as head coach 13 games into the 2008-09 season.

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They developed a very good relationship during Brooks’s tenure, which included three trips to the conference finals, an NBA Finals appearance, a .620 regular-season win percentage, a coach of the year award for Brooks in 2010 and an MVP award for Durant in 2014. Just last week, Durant, whose Thunder is still in the playoffs, defended Brooks, who was roundly criticized for never winning a championship with the Thunder’s talented roster but never won fewer than 45 games in a full season.

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But hiring Brooks – and retaining player development assistant David Adkins, Durant’s assistant coach in high school at Montrose Christian, and anything else the Wizards might do to strengthen connections to Durant – likely won’t be enough to coax Durant for a couple reasons, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

First, Durant, 27, can sign a two-year deal with the Thunder this summer with an opt-out clause to become a free agent in 2017, which would align his contract status with Westbrook and Serge Ibaka and give the trio another season to chase a title together. Waiting another year to sign a new contract would also be a sound financial decision for Durant because it would give him 10 years of service in the league, which would increase from 30 to 35 percent the portion his contract can take of his team’s salary cap. Based on cap projections, that could amount to an extra $40 million over the life of a maximum allowable contract.

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Secondly, it is believed by several people close to Durant that he does not to want to play in his backyard, where family and friends could become a distraction and create pressures outside basketball.

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“That’s going to be the $200 million question. What happens now with the relationship with K.D. and Scott Brooks?” Caron Butler, who played with the Thunder in 2014, said in a phone interview Friday. “I’m great friends with K.D. I just hit him yesterday and talked to him and everything.

“I think it’s unfair for him to be hit with all that noise of the Scott hiring because he’s still playing and he’s still chasing his first championship. And that’s really unfair, all the speculation and stuff. But that’s the nature of the beast. I think it doesn’t hurt to have Scott Brooks in that position with the relationship that already preexists with KD. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.”

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Landing Durant would be a franchise-altering development. It would catapult the Wizards, an organization without a 50-win season since 1979, to the upper echelon of the Eastern Conference, perhaps right to the top. The Wizards are set to give it a shot.

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But the front office and Wall insist increasing chances for their summer fantasy was low on the list of reasons to make Brooks one of the six highest-paid coaches in the NBA without interviewing another candidate. He was hired at the cost of $7 million per year, they say, because he is a defense-first, players’ coach with a success portfolio who is capable of holding players accountable.