Kevin Durant says he hasn’t been able to sleep or eat since his disparaging tweets about his former coach Billy Donovan and most of his former Oklahoma City teammates became national news earlier this week.

The Golden State Warriors superstar told USA Today on Tuesday that he feels truly awful about the tweets, which stated that he “didn’t like the organization or playing for Billy Donovan” and that he couldn’t “win a championship with those cats.”

“To know that I affected Billy Donovan and the Thunder — like, I love those people and I don’t never” want to hurt them, Durant said after first addressing the controversy at a tech convention in San Francisco earlier in the day. “That was just me being a total ... idiot. I own up to it. I want to move on from it.”

On Sunday, someone tweeted at Durant, “give me one legitimate reason for leaving okc other than getting a championship.” Durant’s responses were quickly deleted but had already been captured in screenshots, which spread around social media.


KD has secret accounts that he uses to defend himself and forgot to switch to them when he was replying to this guy I'm actually speechless pic.twitter.com/9245gnpa3c — idk (@harrisonmc15) September 18, 2017

Durant has been known to engage with people on Twitter and admits that he enjoys the back-and-forth with people trying to put him down. But because he wrote these particular tweets in the third person, many believed he had meant to act as if he was a random Twitter user but forgot to log out of his own verified account. The reigning NBA Finals MVP said that was not the case.

“No, no different account,” he said. “I was just on there talking. It kind of looked that way — it did kind of look that way.”

But mainly folks just couldn’t believe that Durant would say such things about his former coach and teammates. Neither can Durant, who said he had just awakened after falling asleep watching football when he posted the tweets.


“I just don’t remember it,” Durant said. “I remember what I said and how I said it, but I just forget everything else. I forgot everything else. I was only focused on that convo, and that was unfortunate. I look like an idiot. My peers are going to look at me like an idiot. All the jokes — bring ‘em. I deserve it.”

He quickly sent an apology to Donovan but knew the damage had already been done.

“I was really, really upset with myself more than anything,” Durant said. “It’s not the fact that people were talking about me, because I deserve that, but I’m just more upset with myself that I let myself go that far, you know what I was saying? It was a joke to me at first. I was doing it all summer, and it went too deep. I went too hard.…

“I haven’t slept in two days, two nights. I haven’t ate. It’s crazy....”


He added: “I’m more so disappointed in myself, that I was acting so childish. What I thought was a joke is serious to everybody else, and I lost sight of that and I apologize for that.

charles.schilken@latimes.com

Twitter: @chewkiii

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