Draymond Green, Kevin Durant, and the Warriors' Tricky Position
Until this week, the Warriors were the NBA's great constant, like gravity or the toxicity of chloride under replicable conditions. The 2018-19 championship would naturally hew to them; all major moves around the league were made with an eye toward beating (or not being able to beat) Golden State. All that changed this week with the heated "altercation" between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green, which caused possibly irrevocable damage to that relationship; rocked this team, so reliant on chemistry, to its core; and threw the Warriors' future—first long-term, then immediate—into a chaotic tailspin.
Between some basic lip reading and a bunch of excellent reporting, it's become clear that there were some long-simmering tensions between Durant and Green. Durant's 2019 free agency is already a topic of speculation, and will only loom larger as the season progresses. It's hard from the outside to see how Durant himself is feeding this beast but apparently Green feels that he's contributing to the "hype," perhaps by not alleviating it. Green was the antagonist and received the one-game suspension, but he may have a point. He has greatly altered his role on the team to accommodate Durant, so it's understandable that he would expect Durant to emphasize staying, not potentially leaving.
The dynamic that's been set into motion here is pretty grim for Golden State. If things are permanently broken—and the more we find out, the more plausible this becomes—the Warriors may have to make a choice between the two future Hall of Famers. Durant is simply one of the most potent offensive weapons the sport has ever seen; the endlessly versatile Green is the anchor of Golden State's defense and an essential part of their offensive system. Durant gives them unmatched firepower but Green is arguably more central to the team's identity. Durant could walk next summer; at the same time, re-upping the volatile Green is a risky proposition. The Warriors would be pretty much screwed and could even potentially lose both players if they were to trade Green and then lose Durant, a scenario that would result in thousands of schadenfreude overdoses online.
But what makes this situation so difficult to parse is that, while Green has some issues with his role on-court, we're really watching a pure psychodrama unfold. It shouldn't come as any surprise that a Durant-Green conflict ends up being largely about emotions and internal states. Durant's well-documented insecurity and thin-skinned-ness have been a running joke for some time; Green constantly strikes a balance between spirited and unhinged, often making questionable decisions that verge on self-sabotage. How we talk about the two has as much to do with what they're thinking and how they're feeling about things as what they accomplish in raw competitive terms. Green may seem more likely to fuck things up but we're now learning that Durant's issues are, at least for Green, alienating in their own right.
At first glance, the mild-mannered Durant and hot-headed Green may seem like ideal foils (or, in a very different universe, complementary best buds). But they're both messy as hell, which sets them apart from their button-down, highly professional teammates, and the Warriors' organizational culture as a whole. The team no longer plays like a well-oiled machine on every possession but things always work. Durant and Green both threaten this sense of order. The longstanding truism "only the Warriors can beat the Warriors" has always been about them getting complacent or losing focus. Instead, it's emotion that may have triggered their downfall. As indomitable as the Warriors can be, they've proven subject to the same pitfalls as anyone else. And it's not as simple as reacting to stress or pressure. Durant and Green have humanized Golden State in the most detrimental way possible. We're seeing evidence that dominating the NBA is not its own reward, in the same way that fabulously successful people can still succumb to depression. Being an exceptional athlete, or an exceptional team, in no way insulates you against the sheer gnarliness of the psyche.
There's no better example of this than Durant. At this point, there's no way around it: he's dealing with some issues and keeps exposing himself in the most guileless way possible. It's actually pretty sad but because people are cruel, or at least pretend to be on social, Durant gets mocked ceaselessly for it. Granted, it's impossible to separate his insecurity and defensiveness out from his decision to come to Golden State. Some people will never forgive him for that and figure it gives them license to drive Durant into the ground, which is a very weird way to think about how we treat others, or exclude athletes and other celebrities from that logic. Durant started this; he made himself into an object of ridicule, and now the ridicule has taken on a life of its own.
But there's another dimension to the Kevin Durant hate. The way Durant accidentally makes himself so vulnerable on a regular basis makes us uncomfortable. Sports, and our consumption of them, have a slippery relationship with feelings. Sports are an outlet for emotions, often ones that would otherwise go unexpressed or even repressed. They can even dictate the contours of people's emotional lives. Things get tricky when someone like Durant makes us stare at a bunch of personal stuff that doesn't fit into an aspirational narrative or strike us as admirable. That's when resentment sets in.
Sports aren't supposed to remind us that we're all fucked up, even Kevin Durant. They're supposed to make things simpler, not more complicated. The Warriors are melting down because ultimately, sports can't keep inconvenient emotions—whether they're Durant's or Green's—at bay. And when this happens to them, it makes things harder for us. It holds up a mirror and reflects back what we are rather than what we want to be. It's quite a departure from the usual heroes and villains fare. But if we push these moments away, we only end up more alienated from ourselves.
