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The Lose appreciates alternative points of view. Today, we are graced with another column from Official Tacoma Resident of In Play Lose, Evans Clinchy, whose work I’m a big fan of, and who has appeared previously on this blog. Evans is an esteemed writer of them basketballs and, today, offers this perspective on the leviathan that the Golden State Warriors have become. Evans warned me, when he submitted this article, “sorry to be hating on your team a bit,” except that it’s completely cool by me. One of the things I’m well aware of is that when you support a club that’s reached the top of the mountain, you’re going to have to take some hits, because some others are going to take their shots – which is what they should do. That’s exactly how it should be. We, as sports fans, should all be so lucky as to have the good fortune of reaching a point where out team carries the bullseye for, above all else, being successful. That’s actually what you want to have happen. It’s the best sort of problem to have.
IN the early-evening hours of Oct. 27, 2016, Kevin Durant stayed a few minutes late after practice. The Warriors had just landed in New Orleans, where Durant was scheduled to play his second-ever game in a Dubs uniform the following day. The team’s mandatory activities had wrapped up at 6:30 p.m., but KD stayed on the practice floor past 7, getting extra shots up while his teammates were gathering their stuff and leaving. KD was also, reportedly, yelling at himself all the while.
“They say you’re not hungry!” the Warriors’ superstar bellowed, according to several media outlets. “I’m out here! Put in work! Stay with it!”
This was a ridiculous media spectacle on multiple levels. First and foremost, talk about a pronoun with no antecedent – there was no “they” and there never had been. Not a soul on planet Earth was accusing Kevin Durant of not being hungry, of not wanting it, of not putting in work. KD was engaged in a shouting match with a straw man. On top of that, even if “they” existed, KD wasn’t proving anything to “them” with this practice gym display. There are few events in the world more commonplace than an NBA player taking the practice floor for a few minutes and putting up jump shots. This shooting session wasn’t newsworthy; it was a lame PR stunt.
Apparently it was an effective one, though. Everyone on the Warriors beat covered it. By shouting just a few words – “They say you’re not hungry!” – Durant had managed to turn a mundane evening at the gym into a headline.
This might seem like just a random vignette from a Warriors practice 20 months ago, but I keep thinking about that day because of the tone it set moving forward. That little shooting session was a perfect encapsulation of the current era we’re living through in NBA history. The takeaway was simple: Until further notice, the drama you witness will not be real drama. It will be manufactured. And honestly, when you get down to it, it’ll be pretty lame.
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The Warriors won the NBA Finals with ease in both 2017 and 2018. Their combined record during those two postseasons was a positively ludicrous 32-6. Of their eight postseason opponents, only this year’s Rockets were able to survive longer than five games. The Warriors had been beatable in the pre-Durant era, even losing to LeBron James’ Cavaliers in 2016; matching LeBron with KD instead of Harrison Barnes turned a once-fair fight into a comically lopsided one. KD’s numbers in nine Finals matchups with the Cavaliers are comic-bookish: 32.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists per game on 54.3% shooting from the field, 45% from 3. This might come as a shock, but when you take an already historically great team and replace its weakest link with an MVP in his prime, it tends to work decently well. (Disclaimer: In NBA history, the sample size for this experiment is one.)
Durant’s arrival in Golden State was an all-time historical fluke. The 2016 Warriors were one of the most desirable free-agent destinations ever, and Durant was one of the most desirable players ever to hit the market. The two just happened to cross paths in the exact summer when a massive new TV contract brought hundreds of millions in new revenue to the NBA, resulting in a salary-cap spike that enabled the Warriors to offer Durant max money. The Warriors had to be willing to make a change, which they were because they’d blown a 3-1 lead against Cleveland in the Finals; Durant also had to want out because he’d just similarly choked from up 3-1 against the Warriors. We have never seen such an absurd confluence of timing and circumstance before in sports history, and I doubt we will again.
A lot of blame has been cast on Durant personally for making his decision. This may or may not be fair, depending on how you frame it. Durant – let’s give him a little credit here – surely knew that going to Golden State would create a juggernaut the likes of which we’ve never seen before. That he did it anyway doesn’t indicate some massive ethical failing on his part. It wasn’t something he “had no right” to do, nor was it something that would “ruin the league.” He simply had the option to choose his employer and he exercised that option. Those who defend Durant are totally justified in doing so. The only really valid counterargument is that KD’s choice was ... well, just kinda lame.
It’s lame because Kevin Durant used to be a compelling character. His quest for self-improvement used to be a story that anyone could appreciate. Durant was a star player practically out of the womb, but the early years of his career were characterized by a desperate need to transcend good and become great. In 2013, he opened up and told Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins that he wasn’t satisfied with what he’d accomplished. “I’ve been second my whole life,” he said. “The second-best player in high school, the second pick in the draft, second in the MVP voting. I came in second in the Finals. I’m tired of being second.” Durant was itching to reach new heights in his career, and it was easy to derive real joy from cheering him on. Beating LeBron was his holy grail, and his struggles to get there felt human and relatable.
For anyone who’s appreciated Durant for a long time, seeing him sign with the Warriors brought a crappy ending to a great story. It’s a basketball deus ex machina – Stephen Curry is basically the NBA’s version of the naval officer randomly stumbling onto the island at the end of Lord of the Flies. Durant didn’t do any favors for the Warriors’ narrative, either. Despite the 73 wins, Golden State seemed a tiny bit fallible before KD arrived. That legendary 2016 team lost in the Finals because Barnes shot an appalling 3-of-18 from the field in Games 6 and 7 combined; the Warriors solved their Barnes problem in the most unsubtle, brute-force way possible, swapping him out for a Hall of Famer. It’s like fixing a flat tire on your Volvo by junking the whole car and buying a Ferrari instead. Doesn’t exactly make you a great mechanic.
The Warriors pre-Durant were terrifyingly good, no doubt, but there was still a vulnerability there. If you caught them on the right night, when the shots weren’t falling or the chemistry was a little off, you could get the best of them. Now, that vulnerability is a lot tougher to find. Even when the 2018 Warriors were bad, they were still good. They struggled in Game 3 of this year’s Finals because Curry shot 3-of-16, including 1-of-10 from distance; it ended up not mattering because Durant just nuked everyone and the Warriors won anyway. This is what’s infuriating about the Warriors – you are supposed to lose when your star player shoots 3-of-16. The post-KD Warriors often don’t; they have most ludicrously wide margin for error in NBA history. Taking a nucleus of three superstars and adding a fourth one wasn’t a strategy – it was a cheat code.
You try to have empathy for both sides. For the Warriors and their fans, this moment feels earned – they spent decades watching helpless teams built by incompetent front offices, and their turn atop the NBA is more than overdue. But for everyone else ... man. It’s not hard to see how this era can offend their sensibilities. To anyone outside the Bay Area bubble, a team this good feels like an affront to what the game is supposed to be about. Why even watch a sport when it feels like there’s so little at stake? “It’s their refusal to run the risk of losing,” Bethlehem Shoals quipped in GQ, “to truly put themselves to the test, that people find so galling.” It’s true. Historically, we’ve watched sports for the uncertainty, the “anything can happen”-ness they can offer us. What do you do when suddenly, very few outcomes seem possible anymore?
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Wait, back up. That wasn’t a rhetorical question. What do you do? If you’re in Cleveland, Houston, Boston or Toronto, how do you handle this period of Warriors dominance? What do you do if you’re a rung below that, desperately hoping for glory days in a place like Milwaukee or New Orleans or Portland?
We already know Klay Thompson’s answer. The Warriors’ All-Star made headlines on the eve of the Finals when he bluntly replied that “It’s not our fault” and that “the rest of the NBA’s got to get better.” He’s right about the first part, as the Warriors have done nothing wrong, but how realistic is he, really, about the second? “Just get better” is a pipe dream when you’re as far away from the Warriors’ level as everyone else. The Rockets became their best selves this year and took a shot at Golden State but missed, and Chris Paul won’t come back next year any younger. The others just aren’t as talented. Kyle Korver can’t transform himself into a 7-foot behemoth wrecking everyone in his path like Kevin Durant. Pascal Siakam can’t become a two-way Swiss Army knife with a Mozart-level basketball IQ like Draymond Green. Even Kyrie Irving, a superstar in his own right, can’t suddenly learn to shoot like Steph. These are fundamental truths. “Just get better” is far easier said than done. All of these teams will try, but it undeniably feels like they’re fighting a losing battle.
Make no mistake – the battle is still compelling. No team, no matter how dominant, should drive you away from the NBA altogether. The league is, and remains, too damn good for that. It is possible, though, that the Warriors will bring about a temporary shift – the league will be compelling, just in a different way. We’ll watch less for the championship destination and more to enjoy the journey. A quick glance at the TV ratings suggests that that’s indeed what’s happening. Finals viewership dipped a little bit in 2018, with the number of Dubs/Cavs viewers moving from just over 20 million in previous years to just over 18 million now, but the regular season is still going strong. Overall NBA viewership was up 8% this year. All of this is fine – there’s no requirement that we care about teams winning titles first and foremost. Sometimes you can lose sight of the forest, get distracted by a few trees and realize, damn, these are some really dope trees.
The NBA can never be ruined. This is the same league that brought us Bryan Colangelo’s wife being caught with five burner Twitter accounts, Eric Bledsoe tweeting “I Dont wanna be here” from Phoenix and lying that he meant “at the hair salon,” and J.R. Smith getting suspended for throwing a bowl of soup at his own assistant coach. (Important detail: The soup was chicken tortilla.) If you’re not finding entertainment value in today’s NBA, that’s on you.
So if anyone tells you Kevin Durant and the Warriors are monsters and league-ruiners, don’t listen. They’re not that. They’re not even bad dudes, really. But it may be time to admit that, compared to the rest of this crazy-as-hell NBA, they’re a little bit dull, and there’s more interesting drama to watch unfold elsewhere. The rest of the league is out here. They’ll put in work. For better or for worse (usually worse), they’ll stick with it.
