Kevin Durant Disagrees with Steve Kerr Saying Warriors Need to Play Angrier

After the Boston Celtics blew out the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night, head coach Steve Kerr said of his team's performance, "It starts with a passion and an anger and an intensity, and it wasn't there tonight," per the Associated Press (h/t USA Today).

But when Kevin Durant was asked about those comments, he didn't necessarily agree with his coach:

The Celtics dominated early and often, winning 128-95 behind Gordon Hayward's 30 points off the bench. Shockingly, it was Golden State's fifth loss by 20 points or more at Oracle Arena this season—an unexpected statistic for the prohibitive favorites to win the NBA title this season.

"I'd love to have some magic potion and say we can come out and play with better energy and better discipline and kind of rectify it, but we've got to, at some point, stop talking about it and figure it out," Steph Curry said following the loss.

Despite the lopsided result, the 44-20 Warriors remain 1.5 games ahead of the Denver Nuggets for the top overall seed in the Western Conference playoffs. After winning three of the last four titles, the Warriors have a switch they can flip in the postseason that most teams don't have.

But Kerr wasn't pleased to see his team simply going through the motions Tuesday.

"It looked to me like we were jogging up the floor. You can't play basketball jogging. You've got to sprint," he said. "Your cuts have to be hard. You have to be going all-out. We did not go all-out and it was embarrassing."

The Warriors were without star guard Klay Thompson for the second straight game, but Kerr wasn't interested in using that as an excuse.

"Klay would have had to play a hell of a game to overcome all that," he noted.

The Warriors have generally been an excellent defensive team in their title runs, but this season, the defense has been suspect. Their defensive rating sits at 109.5, just 16th in the NBA. Golden State can normally simply outgun opponents with its offensive firepower, but come the postseason, the defensive intensity will need to reach its prior levels.