Kevin Durant made the right decision; the NBA failed its fans

Kevin Durant’s decision to join the 73-9 Golden State Warriors has set the NBA world on fire, throwing salt on the wounds of NBA fans across the country tired of superstars taking the lazy way out to NBA championships.

In many respects, I understand the reaction. Fans want to see their teams have a chance to compete for something special, and that’s not the case for 90% of the NBA. Furthermore, fans of small market franchises want to know they have a chance to retain their stars. Oklahoma City, for many fans, was the hope, the prayer that they could build a sustained winner.

For some, Durant’s departure indicated that hope may have been naive. Others are disappointed that Durant “took the easy way out” rather than “will his team to a title” and “rise up and beat the team he was so close to taking down”.

I understand these sentiments; I think the anger is misplaced. Here’s why.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to play with great players

Great players want to play with great players.

This is hardly anything new. Players have been playing with other great players since the dawn of the game. What do Bob Cousy, John Havliceck, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, and Tom Hensohn all have in common? They’re all teammates of Bill Russell — and all in the Hall of Fame.

We as sports fans tend to turn our athletes into action heroes, capable of overcoming all odds for our own civic glory. It’s a very odd desire, really. Outside of sports there are very few walks of life where we romanticize making objectives more difficult than they need to be, on knowingly and willingly making a choice that gives you less of a chance to succeed. It’s weird to think an athlete should turn down that first bit of control he has over his career after the NBA decided where he would work fort he first nine years of his career.

We then try to act like we would have made a different decision, when in reality we all know we’ll never have to make it. We like to pretend a 5-on-5 game is somehow comparable to the decision Durant had to make. We like to puff up about our own competitive spirits, when in reality if we were held to the same level of scrutiny athletes are few would come off as heroically as they portray themselves on the internet.

Because Kevin Durant left in free agency it leaves a bitter taste in our mouth. But the bottom line is Durant wanted more help. He wanted better teammates. Like Michael Jordan did when he campaigned for the Bulls to acquire Dennis Rodman. Like Charles Barkley did when he forced his way out of Philadelphia. Like Moses Malone did when he chose to sign, then participate in a sign-and-trade, to come to Philadelphia and join a team that had just reached the NBA finals. Like LeBron did when he teamed up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to really showcase why superteams are the wave of the future, a crossroad of superstar desire meeting NBA rules which changed the landscape of the NBA’s future.

Sentimentality is the basis for many poor life decisions,, and Kevin Durant was a free agent. By definition that meant Kevin Durant, for the first time in his career, had the chance to select his place of employment, and select his teammates. If you strip away the sentimentality of leaving OKC, the selection of Golden State is a pretty obvious one. Because of the rising salary cap It’s a unique situation that he can join a team like that, and the chance to be a key piece on an all-time-great team has to tug at the strings of any competitor. He’s not just competing against current NBA teams, he’s competing against history.

The scale of Golden State’s talent is different, but the actual decision to join exceptionally talented teammates and not “win it by yourself” has been a truism among NBA athletes for as long as the sport has existed. Basketball is a great example of a team game, and a willingness to fit into a system something I view as a positive characteristic, and often a prerequisite for team success.

Oklahoma City’s Western Conference Finals performance provides no guarantee of future success

A big part of the outcry has been that Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder were up 3-games-to-1 on the Golden State Warriors, and after completing the collapse Durant bolted for the enemy.

Again, I think the fact that Durant was a free agent, unrestricted for the first time in his career, has to be taken into account. The timing of it — just weeks after the Thunder’s collapse to the Warriors — makes it look bad, but I think Durant has to disassociate himself from that situation and look at what’s the best situation for him, and crossing Golden State off the list just because of the emotion of what happened a few weeks ago would have been a mistake. These opportunities to actually have a say in your career, to this degree, come around so infrequently that it behooves Durant to make the best decision for him.

And while Oklahoma City just reached the conference finals, I’m not sure there’s the level of certainty of their future greatness that some are projecting. Russell Westbrook, the only other real star left on the team, is a free agent in 12 months, and hasn’t exactly been committal about his future. They just traded their other star, Serge Ibaka, for relatively unproven youth.

I’m not as in love with the trade as most others are. Oladipo, the prize of the trade, never quite developed into that star Orlando wanted, and has remained a relatively inefficient high-usage offensive player. Perhaps playing alongside Westbrook will help in that regard, but it’s far from a sure thing. The other major piece Oklahoma City acquired is a guy in Domantas Sabonis who at times leading up to the draft was projected to go in the late teens to early twenties because of very legitimate concerns on the defensive side of the court. With three traditional big men in Sabonis, Enes Kanter, and Steven Adams, two of which can’t defend in space or protect the rim, exactly how that front court will compete defensively I’m not sure. While Ibaka’s stats have taken a hit in recent years, his unique talents (shot blocking, ability to switch on the perimeter, three-point shooting) allowed Oklahoma City to trot out a two-big lineup with an effectiveness few could in today’s day and age. Losing that is big.

That’s not to say the trade won’t work out for the Thunder, but any time you make a move that big an element of uncertainty is introduced.

Even beyond that, injuries threaten to derail Oklahoma City’s season at a moments notice, a truth that was painfully showcased the previous season. An injury to either Durant or Westbrook would be tough to overcome, and Oklahoma City has struggled to get the depth to overcome that for years. Golden State, on the other hand, has the talent to mitigate injuries. After how frequently injuries have dampened OKC’s playoff hopes for the majority of Durant’s career, I don’t think that can be understated.

Time washes away context

Twenty years from now, nobody is going to care that Kevin Durant won his championship(s) with an incredible team around him. All great teams are built around multiple superstars working in concert together, whether that’s Bill Russell playing with four future Hall of Famers or Magic Johnson with these guys you may have heard of called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy. Yet these guys are remembered as two of the greatest winners this game has ever known.

The truth is, nobody cares if you win alongside greatness. What people do care about is whether you did or did not win. History isn’t nearly as kind to Charles Barkley, Dominique Wilkins, Patrick Ewing, despite legitimate cases as a lack of supporting talent while in their prime being major contributors to their lack of jewelry.

Heck, you have to look no further than LeBron James, who has every legitimate excuse in the book for his four NBA finals losses, from those wretched Cleveland Cavaliers squads during the early part of his career that had absolutely no business being anywhere near the NBA finals to that injury-depleted mess he willed to contention when the Warriors won their title.

Yet here we were, with LeBron down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA finals, debating what his legacy would be if he did fall to 2-5 in the championship round. The context was stripped away and all that mattered was that number. And that was in the moment. That narrative died not because the context changed but because LeBron finished the series off with an all-time superhuman effort, a run of brilliance that defines LeBron only in that he’s always shown to have that brilliance in him, yet because he did it three games in a row (win) rather than just two out of three (yet another season of coming up short) we now convince ourselves that he’s somehow different.

In truth, we — we as in the media and fans — have a large role in creating the environment why Kevin Durant’s decision was the wise one to make. Time washes away context and all we care about are championships won and lost. Not greatness, not teammates. Championships.

The NBA system is flawed — and the NBA refuses to fix it

All that being said, while I don’t think Durant is the correct recipient of anger, I do understand the frustration about the superteam that now exists in Golden State. If you’re not a fan of the Warriors, Cavaliers, and maybe the Spurs, next year feels like a colossal waste of time. That’s a problem.

It’s a problem the league created.

I’ve written about this a lot in the past. You can read it more in depth here, where I discuss fixing the tanking problem. The two may sound unrelated, but they’re the same. The fact that the NBA creates an environment that encourages stars to congregate in a select few cities is why tanking itself is not only a viable strategy, but also the sane one.

The reasons for this are far and wide. The most obvious reason is that the NBA restricts what players can earn by setting an artificial limit on max contracts — 25% of the salary cap for players with 0-6 years of experience, 30% for players with 7-9 years, and 35% for players with 10+ years in the league.

That rule alone has a huge impact on team building. For one, superstars are comically underpaid, at least respective to the value they bring to franchises. According to one calculation by ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, Kevin Durant would bring $268 million worth of value over the next five years to whatever team he signs with, despite the fact that the maximum he could have signed for this summer was $153 million over that span. It’s crazy to think about, but the highest paid players in the NBA are the biggest steals.

The biggest impact on team building, however, is how that dictates what is required to lure a star in free agency. Since there are only two contracts that could realistically be offered to a player of Durant’s caliber — the one from the team with bird rights, which carries with it an additional fifth year and slightly higher (7.5% over 4.5%) raises, and the four-year contract everybody else can offer — it’s impossible for a team like the Sixers, despite $50 million in cap space, to differentiate themselves.

This causes attracting a free agent to be about the situation: teammates, location, a chance to win. It encourages superstars to team up with other superstars, not because they’re weak, but because it’s how the vast majority of champions are built. It’s why hitting that home run through the draft, to make yourself a destination, is such a priority.

Combine that with the fact that capping max contracts now allow teams to fit multiple superstar players under the salary cap, which wouldn’t be possible if Durant could go out and earn what he’s worth, and the NBA encourages the elite to congregate in a select few cities. Since teams can then go over the salary cap to retain their own players, and are given further exceptions to the salary cap to add additional capable bodies to the mix, there’s little to deter this practice from happening.

Everything about the NBA, from max contracts, to the soft salary cap, to bird rights, encourages this type of movement. Superstars are the most important piece in building an NBA champion, and the league has limited the ways have-not organizations can acquire them.

It’s not the players responsibility to worry about competitive balance, it’s the leagues, and the NBA has failed in that regard.

And here’s the thing: I don’t think the NBA cares. Rivalries drive interest. Superteams, love them or hate them, drive interest. While it sucks to feel like the franchise you care about has no chance to crack the ranks of the NBA’s elite, increasing engagement from casual fans has more economic benefit than giving the diehards hope, and it will be hard for even the most casual NBA fan not to tune into a Golden State game next year to watch the spectacle.

It’s also a problem that the Players Association isn’t likely to want fixed, either. Capping what superstars can earn guarantees a higher earning potential for its middle class. Allowing Durant and LeBron to earn what they’re worth would create a huge divide between league’s stars and everybody else. With an association created to have the best interests of its clients in mind, drastically reducing the earning potential for the vast majority of its clients isn’t the organization’s purpose.

The rising salary cap changed the scale of the problem

In addition to the above rules which encourage superteams, the problem became even more pronounced when the new national television deal caused the salary cap to make an unnatural jump, from $58 million in 2013-14 to $94 million this season.

That jump caused teams, like the Golden State Warriors, who would have otherwise been well over the salary cap to instead be players in free agency. This phenomenon — superstar joins other superstars to create incredible team — is anything but new, but the scale of it is a shock because of this incredibly unique salary cap situation, a problem which was made worse when the Players Association decided against a smoothing of the salary cap.

We value championships above greatness. The NBA allows superteams to be constructed, a situation which was even more drastic because of the unique salary cap situation. Oklahoma City was anything but a sure thing going forward.

If you’re angry at the juggernaut that resides in the bay area, I get that. But place the blame where it belongs: the NBA, the Players Association, the media, and the fans. Kevin Durant is the one acting rationally.