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Kevin Durant's Ghost, The Future, And Appreciating The Warriors In The Moment

The Warriors are great, and the possibility of adding Kevin Durant to the mix next season makes it possible to dream even bigger. But let's enjoy the present.
Photo by Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

The Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder played each other twice a couple weeks ago, in matchups that were exciting both as a possible playoff preview and as a test of the hypothesis that OKC is the Warriors' most challenging playoff foe. The teams' contrasting styles make for a fascinating rivalry, and the rumor that the Thunder's best player, Kevin Durant, could leave Oklahoma City to join the Warriors as a free agent this summer deepens the intrigue a bit. That the Warriors won both games is more or less academic. It's the Durant bit that's interesting.

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Oklahoma City has recovered from their anemic start to join the Warriors and the Spurs in the ranks of the first tier of Western Conference squads, but the shadow of Durant's free-agency has loomed over their entire season. The Warriors have gone from a longshot candidate for his services to the presumptive front-runner should he decide to leave the Thunder, and could hypothetically find the cap space to sign Durant without disrupting their Curry/Klay/Green core and without having to strike a sign-and-trade deal. There is nothing even close to a precedent for a player this good joining a team that's already this good—Durant is one of the league's three best players, and the Warriors are more than halfway to having one of the greatest seasons of all time. There's a reason people keep talking about it.

Read More: Growing Up In A Golden State

There are very reasonable non-basketball reasons for Durant not to want to come to Oakland, but let's set those aside for a second. On a pure basketball level, the case for adding him is so intuitive that it hardly seems discussing. Kevin Durant is one of the league's premier scorers and a brilliant isolation player, but the Thunder's dearth of playmakers means that he's often tasked with creating points out of nothing. NBA.com says that 51.4 percent of Durant's shots come with a defender guarding him tightly or very tightly—no other wing in the league is asked to create so much offense with so little space. On the court with Curry, Thompson, and Green, Durant would have acres of space, and their motion offense could unleash him in the same way it unleashed Curry this season. The prospect of one of the league's most effortless scorers being "unleashed," with the Warriors' core in support, is terrifying to think about.

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One of the Warriors' few weaknesses this season has been an inability to hold leads with their bench; for all their depth, they're still getting outscored when Curry is on the bench. Stagger Durant and Curry's minutes so that one of them is on the floor at all times, and Durant's ability to create his own shot makes this problem instantly disappear. And put Durant in place of Barnes in the Warriors' small lineups with Green at center, and the "death lineup" becomes a Death Star with no pesky design flaws. Concerns about whether Durant can replace Barnes defensively are a bit silly. Durant is a good defender, for one thing, and there are no true power forwards in the league that can both punish him on the offensive end and come close to staying with him on defense. Durant doesn't need to be plugged into the "death lineup" to excel; being on the floor with just one of the Dubs stars as a counterpoint would create a series of impossible mismatches.

It's valid to worry about whether Durant would want to accept the diminishing of his role that would come with joining Steph Curry's team, but a world in which Kevin Durant chooses to come to Golden State is one in which he's already decided that winning is more important than getting his shots and his stats. And the Warriors would win. A lot.

Things change. — Photo by Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports

If there is a basketball case against Kevin Durant coming to the Warriors, it's that the Warriors would have to give up Andrew Bogut to make it work, leaving them with only one real center. Festus Ezeli is capable of being the team's starting center and will continue to blossom, but he also has had only one healthy NBA season. He's injured right now, and with Bogut occasionally out of the lineup, we've seen a glimpse of the Warriors without a starting center: precarious. Despite Marreese Speights rounding into form, and the way Anderson Varejao has seamlessly integrated into the Warriors offense, the prospect of the Warriors relying on either for extended minutes over long stretches of the season is not ideal. Varejao could break down at any moment, and Speights' effectiveness comes and goes with his shot. Even this problem, though, is not intractable. It probably wouldn't be difficult to find a serviceable veteran center who wanted to come to Golden State on a discount. Everybody likes to win.

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Still, something would be lost in the Warriors acquiring Durant. They would likely have to jettison much of their bench to make space for Durant's contract, and with that, lose some of the individuality that makes the team's dominance so fun to watch. Golden State feels like a homegrown team, and to a striking degree actually is—most of their important players were drafted, including the Curry/Thompson/Green core, and the players they acquired by trade or free agency feel apiece with the rest. It took time for this team to mature into what it is now, and that process was a collective one.

Golden State still needs the particular, peculiar contributions of its supporting cast. They need Leandro Barbosa's galloping, head-down drives to the rim. They need Speights' itchy-trigger finger and his three-pointers that still feel like little miracles. They need Shaun Livingston's fully automatic turnaround jumper and workmanlike post game. And so on down the rotation. They don't need all of their supporting cast, every night, but some nights, they need some of them.

The Warriors aren't a great team just because they've found roles for almost every player in their rotation; decent teams tend to find a way to do that. They are a great team because they're at their best when each of their players is most themselves, because almost every player is in a role that maximizes their strengths and masks their weaknesses. The Warriors are a formidable machine, but they are also a lovingly handcrafted one, not the product of assembly-line robotics.

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Kevin Durant coming to Golden State would change that. It would sand down this team's little quirks and make them more sensible and less strange, a little more corporate and a little less personal. The Durant-enhanced Warriors would have such a wide margin of error that they could get away with relying on their overwhelming talent to beat most teams. Right now, the Warriors don't have to be at their best every night to win, but they can't stray too far from the habits of fundamentally sound basketball, either: they have to move the ball, they have to play principled defense, they can't be too sloppy or too lazy. That is what makes them so fun to watch, beyond even Curry's individual heroics.

Adding Durant would also obliterate whatever remains of Golden State's underdog vibes. "Basketball is a business," hardcore fans love to intone. That's true, but only as far as it goes—all pro sports are businesses, but that's not all that they are. That's not why we watch and not why we care. Sports being a business doesn't mean fans should think like businessmen. We're allowed to root for things other than efficiency and ROI.

When you see the future. — Photo by Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

But it's also a mistake to think that the Warriors can stay the same, even if they don't add Durant. Harrison Barnes might leave anyway—the enormous jump in the salary cap that will make it possible for the Warriors to take on Durant's salary also means that other teams are going to have new money burning a hole in their pockets. And if Barnes does bail, the Warriors will have to find a way of replacing him, even if the solution isn't Durant. Even if Barnes stays put, time won't: Andrew Bogut and Andre Iguodala will both be 32 next season, young for human beings but getting on in years for professional basketball players.

If history is any guide, the preternatural chemistry that the makes the Warriors such a juggernaut isn't going to last, either. The team has a carefully constructed balance of egos, roles, and personalities, one that's almost impossible to achieve at all and which by nature cannot be held together for long. The way everyone on the team brings something to the table without asking too much in return, the unselfishness, the confidence, the enduring hunger—these things fade, and change, and tend to drift too far in one direction or another. Maybe we've already seen some faint signs of fraying, in Draymond Green's tirade during halftime of that incredible game at Oklahoma City, or in the fact that someone who was there must have leaked some of the details of his complaint to the press.

Also basketball is hard, and merciless. Green losing half a step would mean the difference between being able to corral an attacking point guard on a switch and that point guard driving past him. Iguodala losing a fraction of the precision on his jumper is the difference between a opposing teams living or dying by leaving him open. The gap between between a team being very good and that team being an all-time great is exactly as small as these tiny differences. As unstoppable as Golden State feels right now, the dominance of this current group is temporary and tenuous. Change is coming, whether it's in the form of a lanky, silky smooth 6'10 scoring machine with a vicious crossover or not. It always is.

And looming over all of this, unsaid, is another deep change—the Warriors' impending move from their home in Oakland across the Bay to San Francisco, from a gentrifying but diverse city that's supported them even in the lean times, to a city in which gentrification has reached a wild peak. In some ways, the move has already started: you can see it in the spiking ticket prices that have inevitably priced-out long time season ticket holders, which is part of the consequences of success in a capitalist society. The move will make this change complete.

This sounds like an elegy, I know. It's difficult to avoid that tone when you're telling someone to appreciate what they have now, because they won't have it long. I suspect Kevin Durant won't come to the Warriors, and I don't know whether he should; I also don't know how I would feel about it if he did. I do know that we're experiencing something special with this team, whatever happens for the rest of this season and over the next offseason. We shouldn't take it for granted.