We are all enlightened here. Or at least those of us who aren’t can be easily ignored. We know that jerks and troglodytes took Kevin Durant’s Golden State switch entirely the wrong way. We can know without even bothering to confirm it that jerseys were burned and epithets used and that you can find in some bitter corner of Oklahoma bars men and women biblically, childishly caterwauling away, saying stuff that’s unfair to Durant and speaks to an ugly sense of ownership they feel over a stranger who is, in the end, just making a decision to work at one company over another. There is all that, and we don’t need to dwell on it if we don’t choose to. That some of us do is a cheap and self-serving bit of juxtaposition: pointing out idiots for the purpose of designating ourselves superior.
Anyway, we can put that to one side; we are all enlightened here. We know unrestricted free agency has been on the NBA’s books since 1988 and that Durant is empowered do whatever he wants in terms of choosing his workplace. We understand the athlete is a laborer and we should, at least on an abstract level, keep his interests in mind because it would be hypocritical not to. We can discern the strange and gross paternalism in arguments that players should stay with a franchise out of loyalty rather than leaving in search of their own happiness. We appreciate Kevin Durant’s talent but make an effort not to conceive of him solely as a collection of skills. We acknowledge his humanity. He is, like all of us, doing what he thinks is best.
We can do all this and still dislike Durant singlehandedly dismantling the Warriors’ strongest Western Conference rival while transforming the Dubs from a juggernaut into something we barely have the superlatives to describe. This move isn’t unprecedented. The 2008 Celtics were a sudden confluence of stars. LeBron James has been part of two Big Threes in Miami and Cleveland. Chris Paul ditched New Orleans to join Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan. The Dwight Howard and Steve Nash Lakers experiment flopped, but they were angling for superteam status. Nearly every summer, one star or another either joins a title contender or turns an already pretty good squad into one.
The implications of Durant’s decision are an order of magnitude more severe than that. There are only insufficient analogies available, in the context of the modern NBA: this is like the 2012 Heat adding Carmelo Anthony or the 2001 Lakers replacing Derek Fisher with Jason Kidd. It is like that, sort of, but the Warriors won 73 games last season, were a Kyrie Irving three-pointer away from repeating as champs, and Kevin Durant is the second-best forward of his generation. This is overkill we don’t see outside of the national defense budget.
And for that reason, it’s not odd to be disappointed in Durant and deflated by what his Oklahoma City exit means for the rest of the league. It’ll be interesting to see what aesthetic heights a Durant-reinforced Warriors team can reach. For those of us who know the Showtime Lakers and Bird’s Celtics only through YouTube clips, this is an opportunity to witness that stratospheric level of basketball in real time, but where those two squads played off each other, the Warriors don’t have a suitable foe. The Spurs and Cavs would have to merge. Barring injury, the 2017 title is a foregone conclusion.
There is an ongoing conversation we have, over in the European soccer-watching world, about the balance between quality and competitive balance. The EPL and La Liga and Serie A aren’t like American sports leagues in that they have a clearly delineated hierarchy. There are a handful of obscenely rich clubs that have nearly all the best players and win nearly everything, an upper-middle class that occasionally compete with the mega-rich but usually don’t, and a large number of relatively impoverished clubs who have existed for a century-plus without a trophy.
What this system lacks in parity it makes up for in class. If La Liga had a salary cap, Celta Vigo and Rayo Vallecano would have an outside shot at a title, but Barcelona and Real Madrid wouldn’t play such mind-expandingly great soccer, nor would the Champions League, where Barça and Madrid meet Bayern Munich and Juventus, be as staggeringly well-played as it is. Some of us are more comfortable with this arrangement than others, and it’s a source of pain for anyone who doesn’t root for one of the continent’s titans, but you either learn to live with it or decide the sport isn’t for you.
The sour byproduct of the plutocratic European system—a smattering of leviathans, and then everyone else—is that a wretched culture of entitlement develops around its historic powers. When you’re expected to win all the time, in every competition, anything less than that is a letdown, and you can hear that state of always-imminent dissatisfaction if you listen to the crowd at the Santiago Bernabéu. They whistle and hiss at phenomenal players for having a solitary bad game; they get violently restless whenever Madrid trail. They spend the entire season uptight and aggrieved, unclenching only when their team finally does what they were supposed to do all along. And when the club fails, there’s a cacophony of accusations and unpleasantness.
The Warriors aren’t quite Real Madrid. That brand of colossal expectation takes decades of winning the Dubs haven’t accrued. But Kevin Durant has made them into a team that can only dominate or suffer the red-assed indignity of a billionaire whose reservation hasn’t been kept. And, even worse, there is not even a metaphorical Barça or Bayern to beat back Golden State. If their success isn’t literally inevitable, it seems like it is, and a season that was set to be fun and fraught is now just shy of a coronation. Durant hasn’t done anything wrong, per se, and he’s created something we’ve never seen before, but the novelty of it will only carry us so far. Is this really going to be so wonderful to watch?
