For those who may have missed it (and according to the overnight TV ratings, not many did), here is an extremely brief Twitter timeline of the Thunder’s Game 7 loss to the Warriors Monday night: 11:26 p.m. Warriors celebrate win.
11:26 p.m. Thunder tweet self-congratulatory legacy thing.
11:27 p.m. ESPN’s Jason Reid questions whether a team built around Kevin Durant can ever win a title.
Durant is 27 years old, still younger than Michael Jordan was when he won his first title. He’s been to the NBA Finals once, and his Thunder beat the Warriors—a team that lost all of nine games in the regular seasons—three times out of seven. Jordan too endured the “can he win a title?” questions, until he did. “I see it as wanting to prove the critics wrong that I may never win a championship,” Jordan told the Chicago Tribune back in 1990. “I feel like I still have the enthusiastic attitude I always had, but I’m more serious now.”
Meanwhile, Durant is also a free agent this summer—in case you hadn’t heard—and of course he had to answer questions about that as well. “We just lost 30 minutes ago,” he said, graciously declining to reveal his summer plans. Does anyone actually believe he hasn’t thought about free agency? No. Does anyone actually believe he was going to say anything about it last night? Of course not.
From a financial point of view it makes the most sense for Durant to re-up and try again, with a player option allowing him to become a free agent again next summer (when Russell Westbrook will also become a free agent). Signing long-term this summer would quell the questions, but at the same time it could prove tremendously costly if the salary cap continues to skyrocket. It seems unlikely that Durant—or Durant’s agents—would make that tradeoff.
This isn’t about Durant’s future, though. That’s set, even if the details aren’t. He will make lots of money, he will play for a team that is in the title chase—Durant’s presence alone virtually guarantees that. He’ll either break through and win a championship or he won’t. But if he doesn’t, it won’t be because it’s impossible to build a title team around him. It will be because the teams built around him couldn’t win a title. Big difference.
The Thunder took a 3-1 series lead on perhaps the best team in basketball history then couldn’t get that final win. Doesn’t that say more about the Warriors’s resilience than the Thunder’s inability to finish?
What this is about is the rush—the rush to judge, the rush to move on, the rush to blame. We ask athletes questions they’ll never answer, publish pre-written tweets supporting narratives we were pushing before a series even started, denigrate the loser before allowing the winner to even celebrate. Less than 20 minutes after the Warriors won, professional troll Jason Whitlock tweeted a poll asking “Who deserves most blame for OKC’s 3-1 meltdown?” As of early this afternoon, over 7,000 people had voted. To be fair, fifty percent blamed the Splash Brothers, the correct answer. Which doesn’t explain the rest of you 3,500.
Is this really who we want to be, what we want to support? It’s an odd focus, this “here’s why the losers lost” rather than “here’s why the winners won.” It’s an especially odd focus following THIS series, where the Warriors set postseason records for threes, and continually hit huge shots over longer defenders. Steph Curry and Klay Thompson are historically great shooters who are more or less impossible to guard. Why is it necessary to blame anyone at all? After all, someone had to lose.
Maybe it’s not that Team A “wanted it more,” or Team B “couldn’t close out.” Maybe in the case of Warriors/Thunder it was simply a case of Team A “had the unanimous MVP who hits 35-footers with ease and can get a shot off in less time than it took to type the period at the end of this sentence.” The Thunder took a 3-1 series lead on perhaps the best team in basketball history then couldn’t get that final win. Doesn’t that say more about the Warriors’s resilience than the Thunder’s inability to finish?
It does, but only for those willing to accept the Warriors’ greatness to begin with. And now we get to the heart of the problem. For many—the “live by the jumper, die by the jumper” crowd—the Warriors were never legitimate. Last season’s 67 wins and championship and this year’s 73 wins and (so far) finals appearance does nothing to change that. Eventually the Warriors will lose. Eventually they will die by the jumper. And at that point all the doubters will have been proven correct, despite all that happened in the meantime. Countered by all available evidence, the belief remains.
So in the meantime, rather than praise the victors, the doubters find fault with the losers. The Warriors didn’t win the Western Conference Finals, the Thunder lost it. This diminishes both the Warriors AND the Thunder, with the implication that the series was the Thunder’s to win had they just not made mistakes, disregarding the fact that a playoff series is not over until it, you know, ends. It also disregards that the Thunder went 5-1 over a six-game stretch with two wins over the 65-win Spurs and three over the 73-win Warriors—including their first loss this year at Oracle—possibly the best stretch of basketball anyone played all year. The Thunder were fantastic and, in the end, the Warriors were better. What if it was really that simple?
Here is a possible explanation: Jordan followed the traditional NBA champion storyline. So did LeBron James. They achieved individual greatness, struggled to defeat a superior opponent, eventually broke through. Even Kobe Bryant, 21 when he won his first title, lived an abbreviated version. Kevin Durant was supposed to be next. He won the scoring titles, made it to the finals in 2012. Then...nothing.
Well, not nothing. But according to the script, Durant should have won a title by now. Instead he’s been stymied; by injury, by the Spurs, by Stephen Curry. Curry, who turned the entire champion narrative on its head, winning a title the first year he made it past the conference finals. In a way, both Curry and Durant have been disrespected, Durant for not living up to the myth (remember Mr. Unreliable?), Curry for seemingly skipping some of the difficult bits, like not playing in the ‘90s.
So we head into another NBA Finals, this time with more traditional storylines—LeBron James and the Cavaliers seeking revenge for last year’s loss, Curry and the Warriors looking to both repeat and cap off their record-setting season with a ring. These are comfortable stories, ones that we’ve heard before. The names have changed, but the script remains the same. Whatever the result, both teams have already achieved so much. Seeking to blame the loser says far more about us than it does about them.
