Hard to argue with lefty sportswriter Dave Zirin’s point that players should be free to determine their own venues, but Kevin Durant’s move to the Warriors strikes at the heart of what makes professional sports interesting; dare I say “worthwhile”? Competitive balance and team cohesiveness.
Durant is a player with the ability to rank with the greatest of all time. Still in his twenties, he has won three scoring titles, one MVP trophy, and led his former Oklahoma City team to several Western Conference titles. He is a perennial all-star of admirably high character, gentleness, and decency. He astounds fans regularly with his agility and shooting touch, which are far beyond what we’ve come to expect from a player with his great height and even greater length.
But Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder team had the Golden State Warriors down 3-1, before losing their last three games. His compatriot star Russell Westbrook was managing, very much against his grain, to play team ball at point guard and not simply, as the best athlete on the floor, look to take over games. Westbrook, Durant’s slightly younger co-star, had decisively outplayed repeat MVP Steph Curry, who could not guard him.
Then in Game Six at Oklahoma City—the game that OKC needed in order to retain the home court advantage it had secured by winning Game One in Oakland, Durant took nineteen first half shots, many of them ill-advised, needlessly long solitary pull-ups, early in the shot clock. Durant not only made just six of those nineteen shots, but managed to keep team-mates frustrated, uninvolved, mystified, and cold. He opened the door to the great comeback that Klay Thompson engineered with his astonishing shooting performance, forcing a Game Seven, in which Durant also underperformed.
Yes, he has the right to leave, a right conferred by the advent of free agency, pioneered by Oscar Robertson, but what about his team-mates—Westbrook and Steven Adams (who took Draymond Green’s best shot)?
Comparisons to LeBron James’s widely criticized 2016 move to Miami (The Decision) are inapt: James’s departure did not trash a strong Cleveland team. Rather, James was understandably and justifiably sick of having to carry a franchise that could not do better by him than Mo Williams as a complementary second star.
Durant’s choice to avoid being the man, to submerge his talents in a team’s concept (wasn’t that what Billy Donovan got OKC to do, until Durant sabotaged it?) reverses the course taken by one of his closest forebears, Ralph Sampson. At 7’4,” Sampson (whom Durant reminds me of most, after Bob McAdoo) won rookie-of-year honors at center in 1983-84, the year before his Houston Rockets drafted Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon. Playing forward to the stronger 7’ Olajuwon’s center, the imperially lanky Sampson was spared banging underneath with the likes of Moses Malone, and once, in 1986, reached the NBA Finals by virtue of his astounding turnaround buzzer-beater to beat Magic and Kareem’s Lakers. He had a perfect situation, but eventually bridled at not being the man. Knee problems conspired with his poor judgment to rob him of the career he seemed destined to enjoy.
The Warriors, in acquiring Durant, have now collected four all-star caliber players, three of whom (Curry, Durant, and Green) finished in the top seven in the year’s MVP balloting, while the fourth—Thompson—saved the Warriors from elimination in that fatal Game Six, jamming a record-setting eleven three-pointers into the crack in the door that Durant left open by playing hero ball.
For the Warriors, it was strictly a business decision. They are constructing what is now referred to as a “super-team.” When majority owner Joe Lacob and his group of investors bought the Warriors in 2010, the $450 million price-tag seemed excessive, but the team is now estimated to be worth around $2 billion. In 2019, the Warriors will move to a new, self-financed waterfront arena complex that will include office buildings and commercial space, in San Francisco, whose African-American population has sunk to 5.8%[1]. This is a franchise that is seen as a model for all others, pioneering a return to the great extra pass ball movement style of the Red Holzman-coached Knicks who won titles in 1970 and 1973.
What of this Warrior franchise and its project of building a “super team”? Where it was recently held that you needed three stars to win a title, not since the 1973 Knickerbocker acquisition of Earl Monroe from Baltimore (a seemingly risky proposition, that succeeded with great aesthetic payoff) has there been a Big Four[2]. And how might this mix with Draymond Green’s passion, which has tended lately toward volatility? Whether Green can accept returning to being the number four guy is uncertain.
In these days of hyper-inflated salaries, what makes a trade (or other transaction resulting in player movement that shifts balance of power) corrupt? What distinguishes Red Auerbach’s 1980 fleecing of the Warriors for Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, in exchange for Joe Barry Carroll, from Don Nelson’s 1991 catastrophic trading of Mitch Richmond for Billy Owens? Smarts? Outcome? Intent? Similarity to anti-trust law violations? Sentimentality and home-town preferences? Loyalty?
There are great differences in eras as well: players control their own movement, to a degree, now. There are also changes resulting from the salary cap, revenue sharing, and salary restrictions determined by number of years in the league. Last, the elephant in the room: the sheer enormity of today’s numbers.
As such, the moral compass points simultaneously in more than four directions at once, and one is thrown back, like Norman Mailer, on one’s sense of smell. What distinguishes Silicon Valley’s mantra of disruption[3] from Mitt Romney’s creative destruction?
In 1975, the New York Knickerbockers acquired all-star forward Spencer Haywood[4] with cash, an originary instance of a big market team simply buying a star on another team (Seattle): shocking in its rank commodification of what had been an (admittedly illusory) pre-free agency Golden Age. Haywood was never quite the same player again.
Why is one transaction in the tradition of the Haywood acquisition and another (like Auerbach’s) a mark of basketball acumen? Why did one succeed and the other fail? What predictive value do those past deals have here?
Golden State is now a team in possession of the MVP of each of the last four years. This is a trophy that LeBron considers his own, and wants it understood that when someone else wins it, it’s on one-year loan only, dammit. He wants it right back.
As for Durant, as a blend-in guy, you could analogize his choice to James going to play with his buddies in Miami. But it’s more of a retreat into being one of many, and should be evaluated accordingly: he can no longer approach James. No sin, but someone has to go up against this guy, and Durant is leaving it to Westbrook all alone! I just can’t get behind that. He could have signed at OKC for just a year, and given a great young team the second shot it deserves, after hero-balling them out of the critical Game Six. If he’d put in one more season, he would have had all his options open, at the very same time Westbrook would be making up his mind.
I don’t think ill of Durant as a person, but I am very disappointed in him as a striving player and proud competitor. The same qualities that kept him from finishing the job in Game Six made him leave. He can no longer redeem himself in that area, thus precluding his moving onto the short list of Oscar, Pettit, Elgin, Russell, Wilt, Kareem, LeBron, Magic, Bird, West, Duncan, and, grudgingly, perhaps Kobe Bryant and Shaq.
This is a Warrior franchise with a proven capacity to self-destruct. I’m reminded again of how Don Nelson’s ill-fated trading of Mitch Richmond for Billy Owens and inability to handle Chris Webber led to the franchise’s plunging into obscurity and mediocrity for many years. Nelson’s patrician stance that so enraged Webber was echoed by his successor P.J. Carlesimo who was physically assaulted in practice by Lattrell Sprewell[5].
If this super-team fails (which I acknowledge is unlikely), the Warriors’ previous unraveling could be cited as a precedent: a template for the self-destruction of an astonishingly entertaining home-grown team through over-reaching. A form of hubris ruled back in the day when the Warriors betrayed their essence as a team in order to get bigger (Owens for Richmond) as they blew up their own chemistry in an effort to bring a title to their all-deserving home team.[6]
These super deals often don’t work out, or maybe my memory is selective. Danny Ainge won a championship in 2008, by collecting Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen, but could not hold the tide versus Kobe’s Lakers the next two years. Sick of losing to Boston with his out-manned Cavalier team-mates, LeBron James took that threesome as his example and got Chris Bosh to come with him and join Dwyane Wade in Miami. That super-team won two titles and were runners-up twice, before James took his talents back home to Ohio.
It used to be said, when the Warriors were mired in that losing stretch spanning from the time of the Nelson-Webber debacle through the current era of prosperity (interrupted briefly by the inspired Baron Davis teams during Nelson’s second go-round with the Warriors) that the Oakland Coliseum (now Oracle Arena) was constructed above the ruins of Indian civilizations.
Maybe Durant will turn out to be another Billy Owens for them: good player, but not the guy they expected. How about OKC and Cleveland though? Let Westbrook join James in Cleveland! Then we’d see just how creative true destruction can be.
Notes
1. With notable exceptions like Nate Thurmond and Al Attles, black stars have not generally thrived in this town, though many have passed through briefly: World Free, Mitch Richmond, Chris Webber. Bernard King played here briefly between undergoing rehab and the Knicks. Jamaal Wilkes won a title here in his rookie year, but moved on to be Magic Johnson’s sidekick in L.A.
2. Five Hall of Famers, actually, though Bill Bradley’s reputation was inflated by who he was, and his great college record, as well as by his great fortune to have the Big Four (Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, and Monroe) as team-mates.
3. Fareed Manjoo (New York Times, June 8, 2016) described the Warriors as a “juggernaut with a modern, disruptive style of play that is consuming everything in its path.” He sees the Warriors as a metaphor for the way the tech industry improves, but also unexpectedly risks ruining. pretty much everything it touches. Manjoo wrote his essay before Draymond Green shifted the balance of the MVP Finals with his swipe at LeBron James’ groin. Creative disruption indeed!
There is also a rough analogy between the Warriors’ accumulation of all-stars and the franchise’s ruthless raising of ticket prices. By contrast, Manjoo points out, Dallas owner Mark Cuban regularly lowers season ticket prices in all but the most expensive tier of seats, thus offering a buffer against gentrification (which is consuming the Bay Area).
4. For Haywood (an early example of a creative destroyer!), it was but one of many groundbreaking moves, including his saving the US Olympic team, at 19, from premature end to U.S. Olympic hegemony when the Black Power movement had cost the U.S.A. the services of more experienced amateurs—college stars Elvin Hayes, Westley Unseld, Bob Lanier, and Lew Alcindor. A hero, but with a retrograde cause!
After two years in college, Haywood left for the ABA, which could sign him, whereas the NBA could not. His legal team challenged the NBA’s rule the next year, and Haywood hit the NBA as an immediate first team all-star, before heavy drug use robbed him of his initial greatness. Recovered (ing) from cocaine, Haywood is now lobbying to change the official name of the provision in the NBA by-laws that allows “underclassmen” (what an anachronism!) to jump to the NBA from “One and Done” to “The Spencer Haywood Rule”.
5. Nelson had constructed a riotously enjoyable, phenomenally entertaining team (affectionately known as Run TMC) built around Chris Mullin, Mitch Richmond, and Tim Hardaway. But the squad lacked the center it needed to become a true title contender. This team initiated the idea of “small ball” that the Warriors now employ. Its entertainment value was further enhanced by the spectacle of 7’7” Manute Bol shooting threes and players attempting off-the-backboard passes. That ended with the trading of Mitch Richmond for Billy Owens—Nelson’s attempt to “get bigger” which two years later blew up in his face.
6. Draymond Green’s ill-advised swipe at LeBron James’s groin could be seen as in that vein (pun intended): it certainly had the effect of destroying- and not very creatively- the Warriors’ momentum, which had had put them ahead of Cleveland 3-1 in this year’s Final.