Editing Kevin Durant

The two most popular Google searches in America on the Fourth of July were “July 4th” and “Declaration of Independence.” The third was “Players’ Tribune.” The popularity of that last search was the result of a story written by Kevin Durant, the National Basketball Association’s 2014 Most Valuable Player and the deputy publisher of the Players’ Tribune, a not yet two-year-old online publication run by professional athletes who wish to tell their stories in their own words. Durant used three hundred and fifty-one words in the story to reveal which team he’d chosen to play for next season. “I understood cognitively that I was facing a crossroads in my evolution as a player and as a man, and that it came with exceptionally difficult choices,” Durant wrote. He opted to join the Golden State Warriors, who, after winning a league-record seventy-three games last year, edged Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, before narrowly losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the N.B.A. Finals. The choice angered a lot of basketball fans, particularly those in Oklahoma. It also gave the Players’ Tribune its biggest day of traffic so far: more than three million unique visitors, which is about what the site usually gets in a month, and is better than the average day on ESPN.com.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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