Going Lawyer Mode to prove that it was KD in those chats

Post Mardi Gras Chatter--KD, tanking(??), Shia, and Hoboken, New Jersey's most evil creation...

Roundup

• Apologies for radio silence…Mardi Gras 2026 has ended and I am back looking at my computer. New Orleans: what a town. Obviously the high-level takeaway from both near and far is the Shia LaBeouf dustup…blog policy dictates that the New Orleans criminal justice system’s operations are too close too home to chat about publicly. DM or pay if you want to get into it. Friends and GF saw him at the scene of the crime about twelve hours prior, I’d already started walking to another bar (Mardi Gras, love it), life is full of these sort of close calls. Mercifully got nowhere close to A$AP Bari. Long and short of the LaBeouf thing is that I wish the guy well and hope he takes Lent seriously.

• Big NBA story this week aside from the Durant burner imbroglio is that Adam Silver is afraid of his own shadow. Crazy, because what little I saw of All Star Weekend was pretty fun. Egor Dëmin won himself a ring (love the guy), the actual games were compelling (loved the part where Scottie Barnes didn’t know he’d hit a game-winner as the big French one flipped a shit), the dunk contest was hilarious. Truly can’t believe that the Richardson nepo baby fell like that, love that the guy I’ve never heard of before won because he dougied a bunch. Just great stuff. Anyhow: Silver. The guy, simply put, is ontologically incapable of not bugging out. In response to the government-mandated month of anti-tanking chatter that’s more a byproduct of our endless conversation economy than genuine public dissatisfaction, the Vampire has purportedly put the league on notice about radical anti-tanking measures to come. My two cents: who cares? The only people with any standing to kvetch about tanking are fans of tanking teams themselves; the Jazz repulse me (these young men do not want to live in Salt Lake City), but only because I think that the Nets deserve their draft pick. As far as everyone else is concerned, though, this really isn’t a problem. To paraphrase Durant: don’t worry about what goes on at the bottom of things. If you’re a fan of a non-tanking team who is in any way preoccupied with the outcome of a February matchup between the Wizards and the Pacers, you should go do some pushups or read a book.

• Love the little Japanese monkey with the plushie toy…

• LaMelo…what’s left to say? Love the kid and hope he doesn’t kill anybody. Keep returning to the compilation of TikTok comments suggesting that basically every driver in Charlotte has had a near-death experience with LaMelo Ball’s insane driving.

• Lot of good music. Xavier, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Daphni…

• Would be remiss if I didn’t offer a word on Hoboken, New Jersey’s prodigal son, Clavicular. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably spent the last two weeks in a torture chamber of Clavicular content—you see the ASU frat leader in your dreams, you have opinions on which legacy media outlet most capably handled the troubled young man, it’s old hat at this point. Won’t belabor the point here, but a quick two things: (1) it’s insane that he’s evidently destroyed his body’s ability to naturally produce testosterone just to look like that (he’s handsome, but nothing to write home about). I’ve toyed with the idea of looksmaxxing as a form of MtM transitioning, but the dirty little secret here is that it’s basically just live-streamed puberty. Bleak stuff—I hope that young men out there don’t follow his lead and (allegedly) take meth to keep a fast going or whatever else…unspoken truth in life is you can sort of just be hot if you want to, obviously. (2) Can’t get over the Hoboken of it all. Have to raise my hand here—I had no idea that Braden Peters grew up in the Mile Square. Everything about him immediately slotted into place in my mind’s eye: growing up in Hoboken means literally living in New York City’s shadow, if you’re predisposed to a completely totalizing inferiority complex, these are the environmental conditions that can ratchet this sort of stuff to the next level. Plus, per NYT, you’ve got the fact that his dad is a stockbroker, which is dangerous stuff in a place like Hoboken. Stockbroker’s kids are supposed to live in the suburbs, maybe fuck around with the car that they got on their sixteenth birthday, play lacrosse…nothing all that new or exciting. About 20 or so years ago, though, a ton of stockbrokers started moving into Hoboken with their families—total disaster. Clav being a case in point—a young man does not navigate a childhood in Hoboken with the name Braden. It’s just antithetical to the culture—you can’t say it with an affected Italian accent that, after long enough, just becomes second nature. The guys at the little league field who do PA don’t stand a chance with something like that. So a guy like young Braden, all of a sudden you’re working on two levels of inferiority: the inability to belong to a place that, definitionally, exists in the shadow of another. Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that he goes on to get obsessed with self-transformation as an ethos rather than a means to an end—he didn’t stand a chance. If he’d grown up in Wycoff he’d be applying to summer banking internships as a junior at Clemson right now, and we all could have saved ourselves a load of trouble.

  And now, a main event: going lawyer mode to prove that Kevin Durant in fact sent those messages

Here we go: as you now know, the basketball internet was set ablaze last week by the allegations that Kevin Durant, the guy who both has faced burner scandals before and whose public persona is largely defined by his love for Twitter, has from roughly 2021 to now maintained an active burner account from which he would DM a group of regular guys to chop it up and occasionally shit on his teammates. High-level take here: I love that this scandal, if true, is sort of the morally pure version of the early-season’s gambling scandal, with Durant dishing insights not to materially advantage any close associates but to get some crying laughing reactions from a bunch of strangers. It’s just totally awesome—I love him and wish every day that he’d never left the Nets (may make two of us…).

To stop myself for a second: enough of the “if true” hedging. This is absolutely real. If I owned my home, I’d put the house on it. If anything, I’m shocked by how many people are approaching this affair with a dose of healthy skepticism (speaking of, the Nothing But Respect boys put out a characteristically great episode nailing down the timeline and articulating both the bear and bull case for all this being real…which, of course, it is). The reason I know it’s real is because a lot of the cast of characters involved—various Durant associates and Brooklyn Nets-centric accounts—are people with whom I, through my phone, am greatly familiar.

There’s about eight different ways toward proving that @gethigher77 is, or was, in fact KD—love the part where all of the replies to the now-locked account are from his buddies and wishing him a happy birthday on his actual birthday—but the most compelling evidence, as far as I’m concerned, is the reaction of the random Twitter guys caught up in it. Here, as always, context helps. The public revelation of Durant’s burner comes amidst a conversation between Durant and one of those bad actor clout-addict guys Pranav Sriraman (hate this guy). Durant, as he is wont to do, responds to a random post of Sriraman’s complaining about the design of a series of NBA trophies (it’s all so ridiculous). Sriraman, for his part, uses the opportunity to call out Durant’s investment in Skydio, a company that supplies drones to the IDF among many drone-interested bad actors. The exchange is both embarrassing for Durant (who is constitutionally incapable of recognizing when he’s lost an internet fight) and for, well, the reader—I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust the people behind accounts like Sriraman’s, and it’s incredibly difficult for me to imagine that he’s coming at this conversation from a place of sincere conviction rather than from the insane and omnipresent online belief that Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is just a way to dunk on strangers on describe things you don’t like.

Anyhow, it’s the type of exchange that (in my opinion) is worth ignoring until our friend basedfrog23 pops his head in with a bombshell—Durant has purportedly shit-talked his Rockets teammates in group chats under the name ‘getoffmydickerson’ (love it). Will get to all of that in a second—but first, by way of proof, it’s helpful to then pull out to a high-performing quote tweet by a “saeedemon25” character (lots of numbers in this affair, could be a fruitful Swiftie numerology exercise for someone with capacity). Saeed, for their part, latches onto Sriraman’s IDF-drone tweet to slam not Durant, but two ostensibly random dudes on Twitter: @PaulTweetsRIP (fka PaulTweets2Much) and @WaveyForever (who, heads will remember, spoke to this very blog for the big aura piece way back when).

By way of background, WF (birth name Dre) and Paul are characters with whom I’ve grown quite familiar through my exposure to the Brooklyn Nets internet. Paul, for his part, is a Nets (and Philadelphia Eagles? How does that happen?) fan and prolific poster whose prose style most resembles that Big Business guy—a lot of quote-tweet bait and talking ball for the love of it. Dre, for his part, is a one-time-if-not-standing Durant fan and one of the funniest posters on the web; if I’m not mistaken, he once jokingly told someone that Kevin was too rich to respond to them and that he would instead. Just a hilarious guy.

Now: an appeal to authority. You know how when a doctor tells you to do something you probably should just do it, insofar as they’ve spent so much time preparing for this moment that they almost certainly have insights into the situation that you, the patient, cannot divine? I have spent enough time on the Brooklyn Nets-centric internet—I want you to picture me groggily dragging my timeline down for one more dreadful pop, telling my girlfriend “five more minutes” from a haze on the couch, truly Requiem for a Dream-style engagement with the Nets internet—to tell you that it makes perfect sense for Durant, if he in fact wanted to chop it up with Twitter strangers, would include Paul and Dre in his inner circle. It just does. They lean pro-Durant, they’re funny enough guys, they share a set of sensibilities with the north stars of the Duranternet (Big Business, Eddie Gonzalez, that Niko guy with the badges in bio), they’re always on their phones. Enough background—zip back to the present. What we have here is Dre and Paul’s involvement in the group chat being public enough knowledge that a different Twitter rando, the aforementioned Saeed, cancels them for being complicit in Durant’s joking about his investments in a company that supplies the IDF with drones.

The hard proof that Durant was in fact out there in those group DMs comes, then, in Paul’s response to his own potential cancellation. The IDF DM in question, in which Mr. Dickerson responds to a shared post about Durant’s investments in Skydio with “If they need drones!! We got ya” (so, so Durant—like, come on), comes after apparent posts from Eddie Gonzalez (well-established KD friend, podcast co-host, etc.) and our friend Paul. Paul, in response to Saeed’s sort of horizontal-plane-punching (good for him, that’s hilarious), issues a statement in his own right:

What we have here, to put a fine point on it, is Paul covering his own ass on the Israel front by saying that all that screenshot shows is him sending a message before Durant’s IDF non-joke. Paul, in other words, is claiming to have not actually riffed with Durant on the Israel of it all, himself. Paul’s response, then, takes as a complete given the fact that 1) the screenshot in question is in fact real (non-doctored) and 2) that the sender in question was, to his knowledge, Kevin Durant. As far as I’m concerned, that is crystal-clear proof that getoffmydickerson is, in fact, Kevin Durant—one of the dudes in the group chat tacitly admitted that it is!

Which leaves us with one final alternate hypothesis of innocence: that gethigher77 was simply someone pretending to be Durant and duping a bunch of people in a group chat for about 4 years. To which I say: get real. The person who sent a message just before Paul in the IDF-shot, remember, is Eddie Gonzalez—again, a real-life friend of Durant’s. What’s more likely? That KD’s actual friend messaged a fake version of his close associate for four years, or that the most internet-addicted NBA star wanted to chop it up with a bunch of dudes who spend their working days enmeshed in Socratic debates about Rodgers v. Mahomes? Wish there was a way to get Polymarket action on this—it is Durant beyond a reasonable doubt.

A word to the wise, though: just because Durant was in fact the guy sending these messages doesn’t mean that every message you see attributed to him is real. I’d be very wary of anything not included in this thread. Even that thread…who knows? I wasn’t in these chats, which fact will haunt me to my dying day. Still…so much good stuff in what I’m calling the Saeed canon: “I miss James,” “I miss Ben Simmons,” the Kyrie cereal line. Durant is just a hilarious guy, and I wish we lived in a world where everybody had a strong enough sense of self that he didn’t feel the need to sneak around with his opinions like these. If it were up to me, Durant would feel empowered to share these thoughts on his main account, TL-posting, for all to enjoy. But, alas, our society is one structured upon shame, decency, and obligation like the court of Guermantes.

Not going to get into the ramifications of these messages—maybe later, lot of Nets stuff in here, and the Israel shit is disappointing if not unsurprising—because this is long enough. But, yeah, it’s absolutely Durant.