KD forced to watch Warrior coronation
KEVIN Durant has been keeping himself busy, though you have to believe, given the choice, he would have preferred to find other ways to occupy his time as June reaches its midway point. On Twitter the past few days, Durant — @KDTrey5 — has been engaging fellow users on an array of subjects: leadership, the development of Kobe Bryant in the mid-late stage of his career, his own basketball skill sets.
It has offered an interesting insight into Durant, who is never shy of opinions.
Notably absent is anything resembling running commentary on the NBA Finals, which will resume Thursday night at Boston’s TD Garden. Had Durant selected a different sliding door on his career, then he would be joining Steph, Klay, Dray and the crew as they attempt to add another championship banner to the collection, this time on a replica parquet floor to help neatly tie the Warriors’ potentially historic legacy into a bright fluorescent bow.
But Durant chose the door that landed him in Brooklyn.
And so the Warriors will try to add a second championship without Durant’s assistance to the pair they won with him copping back-to-back Finals MVP honors in 2017 and 2018.
Forget for a second the question of whether Golden State’s winning one pre-KD and one post-KD would do anything to diminish Durant’s own legacy (hint: it won’t) and let’s just reduce it to the most basic human element of all, one that is so easily accessible to you, to me, to anyone who has basic human feelings:
Isn’t he — pick a word — envious? Covetous? Jealous? Begrudging?
Doesn’t he have to be?
Golden State was his kingdom, after all, even if the Splash Brothers had done much of the heavy lifting before he joined forces with them. If there was an element of NBA fan who found Durant’s defection from Oklahoma City unforgivable — especially since the Thunder had come ever so close to unseating the Warriors in 2016 before blowing a 3-1 lead in the Western finals — there was a far greater segment that under- stood watching Durant and Steph Curry play together was a treat we all should’ve savored more.
Things may have ended in California in a sour blur — Curry, Durant and Thompson all wound up lame in the 2019 Finals, opening the door for the Raptors to unseat them and tilting the NBA map where Durant, blown-out Achilles and all, wound up 3,000 miles to the east, planting his flag in Brooklyn.
The Warriors scuffled for a bit but they’re back on the doorstep, thanks in no small measure to the emergence of Andrew Wiggins, acquired for D’Angelo Russell, who himself was part of the sign-and-trade that made Durant a Net in July 2019. Of course, let’s be real: If Durant had merely stayed a Warrior, he’d be an even bigger part of this Bay Area reemergence than Wiggins could ask to be on his best day.
But he walked away from that.
And it’s different, far different, than whatever residual feelings Kyrie Irving may have seeing his old team, the Celtics, make it to the Finals. It is impossible to believe, after the way things progressed for Irving in Boston, that the C’s would be anywhere near these Finals if he was that team’s alpha dog rather than the Jaylen Brown/Jayson Tatum hydra.
What we have learned about Durant in his two active years in Brooklyn is that he loves basketball, lives it, breathes it. He is a fan of the game. And he is more aware of its history than most players are. He knows what he’s missing out on. He knows what he left behind. Surely, he has watched every game.
Now, he is also one of the three greatest players alive right now, and still in his prime, so he probably also believes, and with reason, that he will return to that stage someday, maybe as soon as next June. And if that happens then Durant will get the last laugh, and it will be at the close of a parade through the Borough of Churches, not with fellow tweeters. As long as Durant is a Net, that is an image Nets fans can cling to rightfully and righteously.
But until that happens? And if the Warriors close out their business in either Game 6 or Game 7, and officially fill with water the moat between themselves and their Kevin Durant Era? Yeah. For now, that would have to sting.