Where were you when the basketball world ended?
I was in the lobby of a cheap hotel in Hue in Vietnam, frantically refreshing my Twitter feed on a minutely basis for an hour.
When the news came that Kevin Durant was joining the Warriors, I yelped to myself and then yelled out to the local staff who spoke very little English. They had no idea what the hell was going on. In truth, neither did I.
This has no precedent. The Decision was big, but this is so, so much bigger. LeBron James stabbing Cleveland in the back in 2010 had higher emotional stakes – because of who he was leaving and the way that he left them – but in pure basketball terms KD to GSW has greater ramifications.
James left to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and then almost nothing else. Mario Chalmers, a washed up Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem were the three next best players. Joel Anthony and Mike Bibby were starters on that team.
There are going to be nights, many nights, during the upcoming NBA season where Kevin Durant will be the fourth best player on his team.
Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson are three of the ten to 15 best players in the NBA. Add Durant to that holy trinity, plus a Finals MVP and star in Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, the best reserve point guard in the league, and Zaza Pachulia, a perfectly respectable big man, and what you have is the basketball apocalypse.
The Warriors are going to be unguardable in a way that no team ever has been before. There is no answer for a Curry/Durant pick and roll. None. You cannot switch, you cannot go under and you cannot go over. All you can do is die.
The defence is going to be significantly better too. Durant was the most destructive force on that end in the GSW-OKC series, wreaking havoc with his long limbs and explosive bounce, disrupting passing lanes and protecting the rim, intimidating the Warriors into submission around the hoop.
It doesn’t matter that the Warriors have little depth. They go four deep in transcendent stars, seven deep in quality personnel. Two of those four stars will be able to be on the court at all times, and even if you have three replacement level players around them, those line-ups are going to be deadly.
But the true death will come with the Super Saiyan Death Line-up of Curry-Thompson-Iguodala-Durant-Green. What the hell do we even do about that line-up as a society, as a community? Someone, please someone, think of the children.
You can’t blame Durant for leaving OKC. He gave them nine years and he gave them everything. He played for a scumbag owner who took him from one of America’s great cities and big markets to the anonymity of Oklahoma City (whose fans were, admittedly, magnificent).
The Thunder were set to be a dynasty before they pinched pennies and shipped out James Harden. They stuck too long with a below average coach, and they never rounded out the roster in the ways that San Antonio and Golden State did – to the bitter end, they could never find Durant sufficient two-way help on the wing.
For the basketball classicists, Durant leaving will be disappointing. It took nine years, but last season Durant finally found himself on a team with a real identity that coalesced to his strengths perfectly. Billy Donovan proved himself as a great coach in the playoffs, and the force and speed that the Thunder played with was a perfect marriage with the sweet violence of its two stars.
They barely broke a sweat in putting a 73-win team on the ropes. Of course, it all fell apart, and maybe that was instructive. But I will go to my grave believing that Oklahoma City were the best team in 2015-16, and would have won the championship if not for Klay Thompson channelling God for an evening.
We’ll never know, though, and the Durant Thunder will go down in history alongside the Nash Suns, Webber Kings and Stockton/Malone Jazz as great teams that were scolded by the cruel fancies of luck and timing.
There’s a sadness in knowing that Durant and Russell Westbrook will never (well, probably never) take on LeBron James in the Finals together again for a chance at redemption and a closure that felt like it should have been inevitable.
The real sadness, though, for me at least, comes for the Warriors – or rather, the idea of the Warriors. The 2011 Mavericks and 2014 Spurs hold a special place in my heart for the selfless, beautiful way they played and became greater than the sum of their parts. But the Warriors of the past two years were right there, playing magical basketball, and the magic came organically. That’s gone now. Where this team was once pure, they are now artificial. Heroes have become villains.
I wanted the Warriors to bounce back next year, and specifically for Curry to bounce back, and prove that the Finals were a mistake – an aberration produced by his injury, Green’s suspension, and James and Kyrie Irving being transcendent enough to snatch an ultimately deserved victory.
That is all out the window now. Curry will likely never be able to entirely redeem his atrocious Game Seven, and his legacy will have something of a small asterisk next to it, much like LeBron’s would have if he’d never gone back to Cleveland. If the Warriors win the title next year it will not be because they showed fortitude like the 2014 Spurs to regroup and bounce back after devastation. It will be because an unprecedented confluence of factors (two 3-1 series collapses, Curry’s outrageous contract, the ridiculous television deal and the absence of salary cap smoothing) allowed them to obtain one of history’s great reinforcements.
Ultimately though, the bittersweet elements of this, the pangs of lament, have to be outweighed by curiosity.
There is no player in the league, and perhaps no player in history, who is a better fit for these Warriors than Durant. James is a better player than Durant, but his skillset doesn’t mesh as cleanly with Golden State. Speed, length, intelligence, shooting, and more shooting – that’s who these Warriors are and that’s who Kevin Durant is. Together, they have a chance to do things we’ve never comprehended before, let alone seen.
The NBA world will keep ticking along, and the other 29 teams will approach October with hope and trepidation. Knicks fans will talk themselves into the 2011 All-Stars, Atlanta will believe its moves are less lateral than people think, and Orlando will try in vain to believe it has the semblance of franchise direction.
But in the grand scheme of things, this is Warriors World until July, because a team that had a legitimate claim as the greatest of all-time just upgraded from Harrison Barnes to Kevin Durant.
Life comes at you fast.
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