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Durant鈥檚 move to Warriors changes NBA landscape
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FOUR All-Stars, two MVPs, a whole new Splash Family in Golden State.
Kevin Durant’s decision to join the Warriors on Monday sent tremors through the NBA, and players and executives throughout the league immediately started to contemplate how the newest super team would alter the landscape.
“Thats crazy!!!! KD in GSW????” Wizards center Marcin Gortat tweeted. “(Are) they gonna score 200 points a game?”
The Warriors already were a super team before one of the league’s most unstoppable scorers decided to leave Oklahoma City for the Bay Area. Golden State won the championship in 2015, rolled to a regular-season record 73 victories last season and came within one game of back-to-back titles when they lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers Game 7 of the NBA finals.
Now they have added the player who nearly eliminated them a round earlier.
But not everyone is anointing them next year’s champions.
“Everyone is so hyped up on the match up problems on the offensive end? They still gotta come down the other end,” Pistons center Andre Drummond tweeted. “Not a very big team.”
Durant’s decision immediately rekindled the discussion about stars leaving teams to chase a championship elsewhere. Durant spent his first nine seasons in Oklahoma City. He helped lead the Thunder to the Western Conference finals thrice and to the NBA finals in 2012, where they lost to the Heat, another super team formed when LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade in Miami.
Durant himself spoke out negatively about creating super teams when James made his decision in 2010. But after the Thunder could never get to the top of the mountain with Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka — and even though they had the Warriors down 1-3 in the conference finals — Durant opted to head west.
“If you can’t beat um, join um,” Clippers forward Paul Pierce tweeted to tweak Durant.
When James left Cleveland for Miami, stars like Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Magic Johnson were critical of the decision to join forces with players he had competed against.
“There’s no way, with hindsight, I would’ve ever called up Larry (Bird), called up Magic and said, ‘Hey, look, let’s get together and play on one team,’” Jordan said in 2010. “But that’s ... things are different. I can’t say that’s a bad thing. It’s an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys.”
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