FAREWELL, KD
Durant heading to Brooklyn, leaving millions on the table rather than return to Golden State
Kevin Durant remained inscrutable until the moment his decision was leaked.
And now that he has decided to be a Brooklyn Net, the Warriors will continue to wonder what they could have done to keep one of the greatest scorers of all time and one of the greatest teams of all time together.
The Warriors offered more years, more money ($57 million more!), a new arena, a more stable franchise and a proven roster to Durant.
None of that seemed to matter. It was but mere decoration on the negotiating table.
Durant wanted Brooklyn. He wanted a new challenge. And that decision is equal parts understandable and perplexing.
Which is to say that it was definitively Durant.
Maybe the Warriors stood no chance to keep him all along. Maybe the decision was made long ago and Bob Myers and Steph Curry wasted their time flying to New York to convince the 7-footer to stay. Maybe it was personal. Or maybe it was simple politics; the NBA seems to be nothing but politics these days.
What’s for certain is that everyone will claim to have the answer and only Durant himself will really know it.
Many will point to Durant’s Achilles tendon injury as the reason he is leaving the Warriors and all that money behind. As I wrote in the aftermath of Game 5 in Toronto, if that’s the case — if Durant believes that the Warriors are culpable for him losing at least one year of his prime and perhaps, going forward, his superpowers — we will find out in due time and it will be ugly.
Perhaps it was Draymond Green and Durant’s showdown in Los Angeles in November — the one where Green told Durant “we don’t need you” and Durant walked away purportedly saying “that’s why I’m out.” The Warriors had to compartmentalize that event all season. Maybe Durant was telling the truth when he went back onto the court.
Maybe it was his business partner, Rich Kleiman, a New Yorker, who convinced Durant to switch coasts. No one can convince a superstar to play for the Knicks, but the Nets are the next best thing, right?
Maybe his friendship with Kyrie Irving — who also signed with the Nets on Sunday — compelled him to leave the Warriors. (Yes, he chose Kyrie over Steph).
Maybe Durant just really
likes New York, the Nets’ roster, and their awesome uniforms. (What’s not to like?)
It could have been a million little things and a whole bunch of big things that came together to lead us to today.
Or maybe it was your social media comment, any one of you.
What I do know is this: When Durant last seriously tested the free agency waters in 2016, he was forthright about what he was looking for in the Bay. At that time, his game was fully formed, but he wanted to take it to the next level. He thought the Warriors could do that for him. I’d argue they did.
More important, though, he wanted to challenge himself as a person by moving across the country and tightening his inner circle. The theory was that the second chapter of his career would bring him peace and fulfillment, so he came to a boom town and joined a team that seemingly had cracked the code of how to be wildly successful and enjoy every moment of it in the modern NBA.
Durant also arrived looking for titles and the external validation from a fickle society that so often comes with them.
He never found that validation.
And now he’ll head elsewhere as a champion, but not a hero. Durant won two NBA Finals MVPs, carrying the Dubs to two more titles, but the Warriors will always be Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green’s team. That’s the homegrown trio that took the Warriors from irrelevance and laughingstock status to the top of the mountain. Durant kept them there — hell, he took less money the past two years to help keep the team together — but he was always a mercenary in the army. Is it a fair charge? Not at all. But sports are hardly a rational place.
As he heads to Brooklyn (or stays — he was in New York when he made the announcement), he might be looking for the same things he was seeking three years ago, even though he now has the titles. Or maybe he no longer is seeking validation from fans and media (a line that seems blurrier by the day).
Things are unquestionably different now, though.
After signing a second consecutive one-year deal to return to the Warriors last summer, his teammates sensed a change in Durant. Sure enough, his final season was all sorts of strange, and his final Warriors game — and everything that led up to that fateful night — only amplified the peculiarity. Removing all of that noise, this moment seemed inevitable. Some of this column was written in December.
And the truth is that the Warriors will be fine without Durant. We’ve seen what a core of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green can do. If all three core players stay at the top of their game, the Warriors will be contending for titles in what well could be a wideopen Western Conference moving forward.
But gone are the days of comical domination, of “ruining the league.” The Golden State dynasty might still be alive, but we have already seen it in its most powerful form.
The Warriors organization can only try to craft a plan to replace Durant, no matter how inadequate such a plan might be. Majority owner Joe Lacob loved his team being the league’s Vanguard — the organization by which all others were judged both on and off the court. This Durant move is a hit to his ego and how the Warriors move forward will be fascinating. For Lightyears Joey, is being good — not great — good enough?
Durant is gone and there’s no way for the Warriors to replace him. It was a tremendous and strange run with No. 35 in blue and gold, but as the team heads across the bay, they lack the equanimity they once oozed.
In this transitional moment, there is some positivity to be gleaned from the fact that Durant didn’t wait around to make his decision. While the NBA’s free-agent moratorium is a laughable sham — nothing can be signed till July 6, even though the news is busting out all over — the capped-out Warriors will have time to attack the marketplace in the coming hours and days.
Had Durant waited until Thursday — his decision in 2015 was announced July 4 — the Warriors would have been given fewer options for Plan B.
But no matter what, the gap between Durant — Plan A — and whatever constitutes the Warriors’ Plan B is more like that between A and Z.
And no one can explain if — much less how — things went wrong.