The main reason for this is that, as a purveyor of Lose, I love me some Cleveland, and I was genuinely happy for the people of Cleveland to finally get the monkey of their collective backs. You can take The Drive and The Fumble and Red Right 88 and throw it all in Lake Erie. You can push aside the miserable memories of Joe Table blowing the save against the Marlins in Game 7. Forget all of that stuff, Cleveland, and have a great party, because you’ve earned it.
I will say to Cleveland, however, that because of this championship, The Lose is now going to have to scuttle his cockamamie pipe dream and scheme to erect the Hall of Lose in your fair city. Sorry. You’re now too good for this. We’re relocating the Hall of Lose to …
Well, where shall we move it to? What long-suffering and miserable sports city deserves this high honor? This is a source of some debate among the Lose faithful, with Buffalo being the obvious choice, of course, but then you had others pushing for Minneapolis and also Washington, D.C., and it’s hard to argue with the level of losing in both places over the past 25 years, and then I started thinking about Vancouver, which hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in over a century, and some other West Coasters made a strong case for San Diego.
And where to locate the Hall of Lose was going to be the subject of this post, in which I was planning to pose the question of what is the worst sports city in (North) America, and now seemed like a good time to write about that, given that it’s the middle of summer and it’s the dog days and other than some grand failure in international soccer (LOL England and Mexico) and some continually bad baseball, there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on at this time of year worth talking about. Oh sure, there might be some offseason NBA stuff to talk about, but that stuff is always overhyped and ultimately proves pretty uninteresting, so why would this summer be any diff …
... erent. Wait. What?
That BOOM I heard on Monday morning was not the sound of all of the illegal fireworks exploding in my neighborhood, rising into the skies and turning the fog pink and green and blue. (4th of July sucks in San Francisco.) No, it was the sound of my phone exploding, as twitter went absolutely nutters in response to the short piece by Kevin Durant, written on The Players Tribune, revealing his free agency decision.
Kevin Durant has agreed to a 2-year, $54,000,000 contract with the Golden State Warriors, and I have to admit that this took me by surprise. This idea of Durant to the Dubs had been talked about quite a bit in Bay Area basketball circles, it had been floated and dabbled and pondered, and there would be the occasional tweet or online clickbait suggesting that it might happen, but I don’t think anyone here really took it all that seriously. It was fun to contemplate, fun to imagine, a passing fancy and an idle daydream, nothing more.
Lose: So, Kevin Durant’s a Warrior now.
Spouse: Wait. What?
And I find myself in a curious place as it relates to this particular news, in that it benefits the Golden State Warriors, a team which I happen to greatly like, and also comes at the expense of the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team which I despise like none other. Indeed, the only people I know who are as giddy as Warriors fans about this news are Sonics fans, all of whom have been waiting for this day to come since the moment the Sonics relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma City, as it’s the day when the Oklahoma City Thunder finally commence their decline and descent into complete irrelevance.
But this is In Play Lose, of course, and while I periodically take partisan approaches to what I’m writing on this blog, I usually make it a point to avoid engaging in schadenfreude. We here at In Play Lose do not believe in reveling in the misfortune of others. (And I’m not using the royal “we” in this case, which I occasionally do for dramatic effect, but speaking to the collective “we” of myself and the readership.) I will occasionally post goofy .gif files to this blog of people doing something stupid for the purposes of comedy:
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| Congrats on the new job, Luke Walton. This is what you have to look forward to in L.A. |
But the point is not to laugh at them so much as laugh with them. Failure is funny, it’s ridiculous and not the desired effect. No one is trying to lose. (Well, other than the Sixers, of course.) Laughter is the best medicine, and when you screw things up, the best course of action is to laugh it off, learn from it, and then go on from there.
I try to be analytical and objective on this blog, and I will attempt to do the same thing in this particular situation, because the moving of Kevin Durant from Oklahoma City to Golden State brings up a number of issues which would fundamentally hold true even if you changed the names of the actors and the names on the front of the jerseys. I’m going to do what I can to be objective here, strongly resisting the temptation to point and laugh and poor little Oklahoma City while also resisting the temptation to giddily jump up and down and clap my hands with delight at the Dubs’ good fortune.
And it’s hard not to do the latter, because with the addition of Kevin Durant, the Warriors have now assembled the most dazzling, most terrifying array of talent on one team that the NBA has ever seen. What happened on Monday was not a seismic shift in the NBA landscape so much as that landscape splitting open and swallowing itself whole. (And judging by recent events, such as Dwyane Wade wearing a Bulls jersey, the league has collectively gone insane.) The Warriors won an NBA title in 2015, and were a minute away from repeating in 2016 after compiling the most successful regular season in NBA history. But they didn’t win the title. Cleveland did, and props to the Cavs for that. So Golden State did what every team, in this or any circumstance, should do, which is look to get better.
They appear to have succeeded.
But before we go any further here, we need a proper nickname. The Warriors had their “Death Lineup” last season – Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, and Harrison Barnes – but now you’ve replaced Barnes (who you should not feel too bad for, since he is now $94,000,000 richer in Dallas) with Durant, so what do you call this quintet? Because this isn’t a death lineup we’re talking about here. Death is too kind. This is scorched earth. This is extinction.
Here is a list of effective field goal percentage in the NBA last season. You’ll notice a few of the names I just mentioned in the previous paragraph extremely high on that list. There were only four players in the NBA who shot 10% higher than their Expected Field Goal Percentage given how open their shots were – a mark which signifies superior marksmanship. Three of them were Steph, Klay, and KD, all of whom are now on the same team. (The fourth, in case you’re curious, was J.J. Redick.) Steph and Klay are arguably two of the greatest shooters in history, and now they’ve added a third, Durant, who also happens to be 6’11” and runs like a gazelle, who can run the break and finish, who has 3-point range but who is also the best midrange scorer in the game, and who also shoots 61% on post-ups – meaning that if the offense somehow breaks down, you can always just throw it to KD, wherever he is on the floor, and let him jump over people and score.
The possibilities are endless, delicious to contemplate and absolutely terrifying for an opposing coach to ponder. How exactly would you defend a Curry-Durant pick and roll? How on earth do you stop that? Draymond Green is going to think it’s Christmas every time he gets the ball at the top of the circle, what with all of the passing options available to him in the Warriors motion offense. It’s not unreasonable to think he might lead the NBA in assists – except for the fact that the Warriors may blow so many opponents out that he, nor anyone else, will consistently run up huge numbers. Klay Thompson is the best catch-and-shoot guy in the NBA, and given all of the open looks available as teams deal with Durant and Curry, he may never need to dribble again. This lineup is unguardable. About the only way you can stop them is to hope they miss.
And oh yeah, I mentioned that Durant is 6’11” didn't I? He is also an outstanding rebounder, which is something the Dubs desperately need, and he showed in the playoffs that he is capable of playing superior defense, which is something that the Dubs will demand. I had never seen the D from KD quite like I did in that series between OKC the Dubs. He was a human pogo stick out there, blocking shots and getting his long and rangy arms in every passing lane. I never thought of him as an élite defender before, but he has that capability in his repertoire. He is a complete player and not simply a scorer.
This lineup is absolutely preposterous. And I can go on and on, because it’s not a stretch to say that this is the greatest assemblage of talent, in one place, that the NBA has ever seen. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas have already established some of the most ridiculous preseason odds imaginable: last time I looked, the Warriors were -140 to win the title and that line was still plummeting, while the over/under was at 68.5 wins, meaning that if you take the over, you’re anticipating them to have among the four greatest regular seasons in NBA history. People around the game have said they think another 73-win season in unlikely, as this past season has shown to everyone just how meaningless the regular season can be and the Warriors aren’t likely to focus on it, but Golden State can probably win a whole lot of games just by showing up and making some shots and doing little else. Rest and player health will likely be of greatest concern throughout the course of season, but the need for resting players will likely be offset simply by blowing teams out and then sitting guys for the entire 4th Quarter.
Unlike previous conglomerations of supreme talent in the NBA, which took time to figure out how to get players to mesh, this transition will likely be about as seamless as you can get. The Warriors have a defined style of play, a commitment to sharing the basketball and moving the ball to open shooters, and Durant’s skill set is an ideal complement to that game. Durant is an underrated passer, a skill he has rarely had to show off in the iso heavy OKC offense, and I am not all that worried about how he will jibe with Curry. Steph Curry is the two-time MVP of the league, and Rule #1 of good management in the NBA is keep the superstar happy. If Steph says he does not want Kevin Durant on this team, then Kevin Durant would not be on this team. Plain and simple.
“According to a person who saw the text messages, Curry told Durant in a text message that he could care less about who is the face of the franchise, who gets the most recognition or who sells the most shoes (Curry is with Under Armor, Durant with Nike). The two-time NBA MVP also told Durant that if Durant won the MVP award again he would be in the front row of the press conference clapping for him. In closing, Curry’s message to Durant was that all he truly cared about was winning championships and he’d like to do that as his teammate.” – Marc Spears, The Undefeated
I can’t wait to see what this looks like on the floor. It’s going to be spectacular viewing, must-see TV, and people will tune in and turn up, all right. Warriors tickets for away games this past season were already going for 10-15 times the rate of other teams on the secondary markets, and the TV ratings for the finals against the Cavs were among the highest in history. This is good for the NBA, just as the creation of the LeBron-Wade-Bosh axis in Miami was good for the NBA, because it further generated interest. And the Warriors will now be the ultimate NBA villains, which is also good for the game. We love having enemies. We need opponents to hate, if it’s for all of the right reasons – the primary reason being that they’re really damn good!
I grew up in the era of the Showtime Lakers. I hated the Showtime Lakers. I was living in L.A. during their heyday and I despised that team. And do you know why I despised that team? Because they were great. They were absolutely great, and as much as I hated them, I also watched them intently because I wanted to see what they were doing and learn from it. And so was everyone else in the game, in the end, because in order to defeat a team that good, you have to learn from it first. That’s what always happens when a dynast, or potential dynast, comes along. If you don’t like what the Warriors have done, then figure out how to beat them.
And nothing is pre-ordained here. The Warriors haven’t won anything yet. If there’d ever been a season where the results seemed pre-ordained, it would’ve been this past one – and then Steph Curry slips on a wet spot and injures his right knee in the 4th game of the playoffs, at which point the whole equation changed. There are no guarantees and nothing is assured. And there will be a challenger arising, because there always is. This coming season, if I’m LeBron, I’m loving the challenge of trying to beat this team. If I’m Pop down in San Antonio, I’m loving going to work and trying to scheme up a defense to stop them. The Warriors seem as if they’re poised to dominate the league for the next five years – oh, by the way, the Dubs’ Four Horsemen of the NBA Apocalypse are all under 28 years of age – but a challenger will invariably arise. We just don’t know necessarily who it will be, at this point. Maybe Boston gets the #1 pick in next year’s draft, and the #1 pick in the draft after that, thanks to the gift that keeps on giving which are the Brooklyn Nets. Maybe it’s Minnesota when their super young talent comes of age. Maybe another élite talent bails on a bad franchise in free agency in a few years. (Anthony Davis, anyone?) You don’t know where it’s going to come from, but the challenge will come.
Hell, you could never have imagined this Warriors team even existing five years ago. Read this article again. This franchise was a tire fire. They got to being élite through drafting guys who turned out to be a whole let better than people thought, and through making shrewd moves in trades and free agency to add complimentary pieces. Joe Lacob may be irritatingly, annoyingly smug, but he wasn’t totally wrong in what he said about them being “light years ahead.”
That the Warriors were perfectly positioned to poach Durant from the Thunder owes to several flukes and accidents, of course. For starters, the salary cap spiked from $70,000,000 to $94,000,000 this offseason, which gave the Warriors more money to play with than previously imagined, and also meant they could sign Durant without losing any of the core guys they actually wanted to keep, since their three All-Stars are all on what are comparative bargains by NBA wage standards. (If you can call $205,000,000 a bargain.) Most importantly of the three, Steph Curry is probably the most grossly underpaid professional athlete on the planet, having signed a 4-year, $44,000,000 contract extension in the wake of his recurring ankle injuries. Having a superstar talent on sub- to mid-level money frees the Warriors up to do so many things in terms of talent acquisition that other teams simply cannot do. In an online discussion, I likened this Warriors scenario to how the Seattle Seahawks built a Super Bowl champion. The Seahawks were able to stock up on quality players using the money they weren’t paying Russell Wilson – whereas most NFL clubs are laden with lofty salaries for franchise QBs, the Seahawks were paying a franchise QB they stumbled upon the money reserved for a 3rd-round draft pick. Timing is everything in sports, and indeed, in life.
The Warriors had the money available to offer Durant, but they also had the culture to offer Durant. Oklahoma City has always had a reputation as an organization of being very well-run, but also being thrifty, uptight, a little bit stiff, and a little bit strange. The Warriors, meanwhile, are free and easy. They make the game look effortless at times, they play with a joy and an openness that’s exciting. Who wouldn’t want to play with a team like that – especially one that wins, and wins all the frickin’ time! It would appear that Durant was finding tiresome the way OKC were playing the game, and he wanted something different. He wanted something new.
And after playing for nine years in the league, Kevin Durant had a right to make that choice. Take the money out of it for a sec, because we all know they’re making lots of money. That’s a given. You’re making lots of money even if you’re the 13th man on the Milwaukee Bucks. Everyone’s getting paid. But let us consider the process here, and chart out the course of his career: Durant is 18 and a gifted basketball player, clearly a transcendent talent, but instead of becoming a professional, he has to spend a year at the University of Texas because of some bogus age requirement instituted by the NBA after too many owners stupidly drafted 18-year-olds who couldn’t actually play. After that, he gets drafted by Seattle, regardless of whether he wanted to play in Seattle or not, and then after a season he’s uprooted when the team relocates to Oklahoma City, regardless of whether he has any interest in going there or not, and then he eventually signs a new contract whose terms on precisely how much he can be paid are dictated entirely for him. He never has any choice in this matter whatsoever. And yeah, a lot of us take shitty jobs when we enter the workforce. A lot of us have to pay our dues and take weird gigs in weird places (which is how my New York parents would up living in Pullman, Washington). But at some point, we have a right to choose and make decisions about our future for ourselves.
And under the terms of the CBA negotiated between the Players Union and the league, Kevin Durant has the right to finally make his own choice about where he chooses to work, and so what does he do? HE TAKES A BETTER JOB! This is a workplace, in the end, and guess what? Playing for a 73-win team with three other all-stars, in a style of play which fits you perfectly, in a city where you can also maximize your brand which is also an economic engine that offers you a whole host of off-the-court opportunities, is a better job than what he had in Oklahoma City. If dollars are equal, which they were, then why wouldn’t he take that opportunity?
And by the way, I’d feel this way even if he had gone somewhere other than Golden State. You want to go to Boston? Sweet! Team up with Horford and kick some Cleveland ass! You want to join the Spurs and challenge the Dubs? Awesome. Let’s ball! (I never took the Miami or L.A. Clippers stuff seriously. Miami had no chance after deciding to pin its fortunes to Hassan Whiteside. The Clippers had no chance either because they’re hopeless, but hey, at least Doc Rivers agreed to give his son Austin a bigger allowance this off-season.) Or maybe he decided, in the end, he was better off staying put. That’s fine, too. The point is that he has the right to make that choice, regardless of what he ultimately decides, and you can’t say that you support that right only when it’s convenient to do so, and only when your team benefits.
The criticism of his decision to join the Warriors is dumb. Somehow, if you don’t win a title, you’re a bum, but if you go to a team that can win one, you’re also a bum. This sort of stupidity is put forth either by ex-players who never won anything, or guys who are hypocrites. Charles Barkley said Durant was trying to “cheat” his way to a title – spoken like a guy who toughed it out with the Philadelphia 76ers and never did anything like force a trade to the Phoenix Suns or anything like that … oh wait, except that he did that. Somehow Durant is villified, but not Shaq even though he bailed on the Magic ASAP after the Rockets kicked their ass in the NBA finals. What a bunch of bullshit. Good on Chuck and Shaq for finding better workplaces, and good on anyone who does that. “You shouldn’t go to the team that just beat you.” Oh, OK, so then, signing with the Warriors would have been OK if they’d lost to the Spurs or the Mavericks instead? So he shouldn’t go to a better situation at Golden State, but he should instead choose a worse situation elsewhere? That runs contrary to the whole idea of giving players agency in deciding where they want to play. That line of reasoning makes no sense.
And I’m not interested in the slightest in hearing about how Kevin Durant becoming a Warrior affects the parity and competitive balance of the league. There is no parity, nor has there ever been. Someone please point me to the era of parity in the NBA. The Bulls won six titles in the 1990s. The Lakers and Celtics flip-flopped for most of the 1980s. In the 18 years of the post-Jordan era, 13 of the titles have been won by a total of three teams. Parity is a myth, a word the owners like to trot out every time they want to reopen labor negotiations and attempt to screw over the players. Don’t believe it. The salary cap and the luxury tax and all of that stuff is in place to create cost certainty for the owners, not to create “competitive balance.” Durant goes to the Warriors and now supposedly there is no competitive balance, since only two teams seem like realistic title contenders. This is different from last season where there were how many? Four, maybe? So don’t buy that crap. It’s a myth.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a lot of good stuff to watch. I want to see what the Spurs cook up. I want to see what Minnesota is doing. I want to see the Jazz get physical with the Dubs and play some nasty D. I want to see the Dubs and the Clips put about 270 points on the scoreboard. I want to see Portland try to beat the Dubs using the strategy of Dame and C.J. scoring 80 between them, and probably pulling it off at some point. I want to see Cleveland’s title defense, and what Danny Ainge conjures up in Boston to challenge the Cavs. There’s a lot of great basketball out there. And since this is In Play Lose, of course, I also want some horrible basketball. Give me some Sixers and some Nets and some Kings, and this Bulls team is going to be great to follow with this Wade-Rondo-Butler trio, which may be the most miscast, ill-fitting trio ever conceived. The Bulls just seems like a disaster waiting to happen – my specialty.
And it will also be amusing as hell to me to watch what happens to OKC. In one fell swoop, the Warriors made themselves better and also killed their biggest Western Conference rival in the process, which is truly the sign of a successful off-season. OKC still has a decent roster, but it’s a bit ill-suited for a guy like Russell Westbrook. They might be a 45-win team, at best. Westbrook is a free agent this coming summer, and with the extra cash not spent on Durant, OKC can offer him a contract extension, but early indications have been that he intends to leave as well – at which point, if you’re OKC, you simply have to trade him, even if you only get 50¢ on the dollar. But they’re trading from a somewhat weakened position, since no one’s going to trade the sorts of assets OKC will want for a Top 10 NBA player if Westbrook isn’t interested in re-upping with them. (The only one paying that much for a rental is Durant for a new apartment in the Bay Area.) I was posing this question to our Blazers correspondent Evans, putting him in the role of Danny Ainge in Boston, who has the most assets to deal of any club, to which Evans responded, “it’s a tough call on making a trade for Westbrook, because he’s so ball-dominant.” And that’s part of the problem. If you have the sorts of assets OKC might want, is it really going to be worth it to you to make that deal?
So the Thunder are stuck here. They just lost Kevin Durant, their franchise player (“the founding father of the franchise” as was said in the OKC press conference), they’ve already traded away another franchise-level player – James Harden – in the past and got pennies on the dollar for it, and now they’ll possibly have to deal a third in Westbrook. Even they will admit that they can’t draw free agents to Oklahoma City, and this is a classic case of Edmonton Disease if there ever was one: if dollars are equal (which they are more so in the NBA, where they put a cap on maximum salaries you can earn, than in any other league), then why would anyone willingly choose to play in Oklahoma City? Quite honestly, why would anyone coach there, either? It struck me as strange when Billy Donovan took that gig, since it was a very real possibility that the most appealing aspect of the job – having Durant and Westbrook on your roster – wouldn’t be the case in two years’ time. The Thunder struck it rich thrice in the draft, and they’ll have to somehow get twice or thrice lucky again. Otherwise, they’re probably doomed to irrelevancy.
Well gosh, isn’t that is a surprise? This piece makes the very point that I’ve been making from the moment the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City, which is that in choosing to allow a team to move into what’s not in any way a sustainable, long-term market, you’re ultimately devaluing that franchise and very likely dooming it to fail. Every franchise involved in the David Stern Axis of Weasel, the idiotic Charlotte/New Orleans/Oklahoma City/Seattle/Sacramento reshuffling that took place, either already is or likely is destined to be a basket case. I mean, I went to a Pelicans game this past January when I was in New Orleans, and there were about 11,000 people in attendance at Milk Shake Arena for it, and the building was dead. It was just dead. How is that ever going to improve? Why would anyone choose to go there as a free agent, or choose to stay there when their contract is up? The Pelicans are hopeless, the Kings are hopeless, the Bobcats/Hornets/Jordanaires in Charlotte have been a joke, the Grizzlies delayed it for a while but are ultimately headed that way – another genius move by Stern, shifting that franchise out of a what is now very rich and very prosperous Vancouver – and now, there is a very good chance the Oklahoma City Thunder are finally going to start sinking like stones.
You can, of course, be successful as a small market franchise – but in order to do so, you have to be good. You have to be really good. You have to win a lot, and establish a longstanding culture of winning. The San Antonio Spurs have won five titles; the Utah Jazz were great for 20 years. In order to sustain and continue to thrive in the long-term, OKC had to lay that foundation. They had to win championships, they had to establish a legacy – and even though they were blessed with some of the game’s greatest talent, they’ve now failed to do that. And now it’s verging on crashing down, and pretty soon they won’t have anything left to show for it.
And for Sonics fans – who are OKC haters, all of us – the day that Kevin Durant chose to leave Oklahoma City was the day that they’ve been waiting for, since it’s the day that the stolen franchise begins a descent first into mediocrity, and then into complete irrelevancy. Seattle fans have zero sympathy for anyone in OKC who wants to bemoan their small market fate. Boo-fucking-hoo. They were gifted the last two good assets from Seattle, Durant and Westbrook (who plunked a Sonics hat onto his head on the day he was drafted), two players who became two superstars and who almost won a title along the way and were probably unlucky not to do so, almost creating that everlasting legacy for themselves and legitimacy for the franchise. But that didn’t happen, and it turns out it was only staving off the inevitable, because OKC is a small market in the middle of nowhere and is an undesirable destination for an NBA player. It’s no place that any of them want to be. This day was a long, long time in coming. A league is only as good as its weakest franchises – which is why it’s smart of the EPL to throw the weak ones out every year (sigh) – and there’s a lot of dead franchises in the NBA. Frankly, a large part of why there is no parity in the NBA is because there are so many franchises which are utterly hopeless.
And that’s all the schadenfreude you’re going to get out of me in this edition of In Play Lose.
And now I have to wait for the season to start until October? Really? I want the season to start immediately! This is going to be great to witness, either from afar or from up close – but I definitely want to be up close, which means I need to be nice to Smith, the Official Warriors Season Ticket Holder of In Play Lose, so maybe I should beat his ass less often at facebook Scrabble and generally suck up to him more in order to get some tickets. Nah, I’ll keep beating his ass in scrabble. But hey, Smith, are we still on for that Sixers game, right? You know how I love me some Sixers …
