Does Kevin Durant Need a New Challenge?

It was once nearly impossible to dislike Kevin Durant, a shy, affable guy with murderous game who was fiercely loyal to his small-market franchise and its fans. You wanted to see Durant thrive. It felt like the right person being rewarded for doing it the right way. Outside of kidding-not-kidding speculation that Russell Westbrook drove him nuts at times, we rarely thought about Durant’s inner life, because why would we have? He was fine, we were fine, and things were humming along according to plan.

All that changed when Durant signed with the Warriors and we suddenly found ourselves very concerned with his thoughts and feelings, as in “what was Kevin Durant thinking??!” His decision to join the 73-win team that the Thunder had just pushed to the brink of elimination in the Western Conference Finals was blatantly front-running, the ultimate “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em mood” at a time when the former was anything but a foregone conclusion. A backlash was all but inevitable—surely, Durant knew exactly what he was in for. Anyone with a cursory understanding of sports discourse could read the tea leaves.

By wrecking the league’s competitive balance, the Warriors went against the natural order of things. Durant sees fans and the media as having done something similar, and seemed to cast himself as an aggrieved victim. Not only was he shocked by what’s happened—it felt like he was absolutely ill-equipped to deal with it. His reaction only makes sense when you understand him as having a massive blind spot. Durant had assumed that public good will toward an athlete was fixed and durable—a real human relationship—as opposed to a brutal function of narrative and news cycle. Any illusions about the fundamentally good and just nature of the world were shattered. He thought we loved him, and maybe we did, but he failed to grasp just how utterly contingent things really were all along.

There’s an element of masochism to Durant lurking online to engage with some of his harshest, and least important, critics. It’s like he’s hoping to wake up from a bad dream, and will stare it in the face until it goes away. He may just be gawking, hurt, and still incredulous at how much pleasure people get out of ragging on him. That’s because this is personal and the only way for them to feel better about being having been wrong about Kevin Durant is to punish him. They mock him for a host of obvious reasons. ("Kevin Durant ruined the NBA" might be the most overused meme currently out.) But if they were being honest, they’d also be laughing at themselves for having been so gullible—for having thought that Durant was actually good and pure. And that’s just not going to fly in sports, where introspection and vulnerability are hardly the first order of business.

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Ironically enough, Durant’s reaction to our reaction actually shows that, in certain ways, we were right about him all along. We now have every reason to believe Durant was genuine; there’s simply no other explanation for how he’s handled this situation. We’ve also gone from dealing with the image of Durant, and all the symbolism it implied, to his actual thoughts and feelings, and because people are messy, complex, and imperfect, it ain’t pretty. Of course a person who hovered over the worldly fray would be flummoxed by an angry mob. We should’ve seen that one coming.

Now the Warriors are boring, and Durant can at times overshadow his own continued dominance. They will win more titles without changing much or trying particularly hard, because why would they? Durant, too, is now a dead zone. He will be deployed in a way that makes optimal use of what we already knew he did well; when an athlete isn’t consistently challenged, they have nothing to respond to and no good reason to evolve. His progress is incremental and situational. As long as he’s a Warrior flanked by future Hall of Famers, Durant is unexciting from a basketball standpoint, which is why his psycho-drama is always front and center. And as long as we continue to make a big deal out of it, he won’t be able to let it alone, either.

Durant is a free agent this coming summer and already there are whisperings that he could leave Golden State. He came there to get titles, and he will likely win his third this season. But unless he finds a way to to once again really compete and push himself, those champions will ring somehow less hollow, and he’ll be trapped indefinitely in a state of things that causes him real pain. If Durant goes elsewhere—say, New York to rejuvenate the Knicks—we’ll learn to respect him again because that’s how sports works. LeBron James fell out of favor when he went to Miami, and while that rancor dissipated over time, his return to Cleveland put him back in everyone’s good grace. It even led to his time in Miami being viewed in a more charitable light. For James, a change of scenery didn’t just undo the damage he’d done to his image. It had him sitting even prettier than before.

Could a new team work for Durant? On one hand, we know too much about him and he knows too much about us, and there's no going back. And while Durant would welcome a change of heart, there’s no way he will trust us again. He probably never should have in the first place. And while we weren’t wrong about Kevin Durant, we were wrong to think we ever really cared.