This was back in the postseason, when the Golden State Warriors were riding high and guard Klay Thompson pondered a question about his team and a culture unique to almost any place in professional sports.
“There’s no egos, that says a lot,” he said. “We have a team that doesn’t care about the limelight or the hype that comes with it. We realize all that extra stuff will come if we win.”
If you wonder how Kevin Durant, one of the three best players in the NBA, can play on the same team as another of the league’s three best players, Steph Curry, the answer lies in the way the Warriors are built. Teams take on the personality of their top player and Curry is unlike most superstars who demand the world swirls around themselves (even if his public image was hit by displays of petulance as his temper boiled over in this year’s NBA finals). Curry – as the team’s shooting coach Bruce Fraser told the Guardian this spring – is a pleaser. He wants others to be happy.
“If the superstar is willing to be coached, then everyone has to fall in line,” Golden State general manager Bob Myers told the Guardian in May. “Anytime you have a coach having to revolve around a player it hampers his ability to coach.”
Curry, who led the NBA with 30.1 points-per-game last season, has always worked with Warriors coach Steve Kerr rather than dictate a style or system. It is evidence that he will also find a way to accommodate the 27-30 points-per-game that Durant scores. Once Curry does this, Durant will adapt as well and when the rest of the Warriors see Curry and Durant squelching their scoring for the sake of winning they too will alter their ambition in the name of winning. This is how the team that set an NBA record for victories in 2015-16 should stay on top.
Few teams could have properly handled a player like Durant, providing a way for him to thrive and win the championship he longs to have at 27 years old. But there’s probably no other situation that would have pulled Durant from the only organization he has ever known. Another year, another time, Durant would have almost certainly stayed in Oklahoma City. With the Warriors he will join a team that was carefully built without the tension of big personalities and hungry now to win another title after narrowly missing their second last month. They proved, in the finals, they need a player like Durant when Curry’s injuries and lapses in focus frustrated him and left Golden State vulnerable to Cleveland’s aggressive, physical defense. Durant will take away the double-teams Curry and Thompson faced throughout the playoffs.
“What I think gets underrated in sports is intelligence – intelligence in playing the game the right way,” Myers said in May. “In basketball you have to understand the dynamics of a team. You hear people talk about ‘having a high basketball IQ’ or ‘they know how to play.’ What that means is: do they know how to make the reverse pass? Things like that. Some of that is innate but the more guys like that play together they more they do it the right way.”
The Warriors don’t play with ferocity but they play smart. Part of the reason Myers helped hire Steve Kerr as the Warriors coach in the spring of 2014 is that he liked Kerr’s method for managing a team. The most important of Kerr’s core principles is joy. Players must love what they do and respect each other if they want to win. Kerr and his staff talked endlessly about joy these last two seasons and there is no doubt the enthusiasm with which the Warriors played helped them outlast Durant’s Thunder in the Western Conference Finals when Oklahoma City collapsed in Games 6 and 7.
Durant, who is one of the most perceptive players in the NBA, must have noticed this. He also likely listened when Myers told him (according to The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski) “Without you we might win a title or two, without us you might win too. Together? We will win a bunch.” While most teams with superstars sell that player’s all-consuming rage to win a championship, Myers and the rest of the Warriors contingent that visited Durant in the Hamptons last weekend, pushed the idea of a happy group of players pulling together to win.
“I think a lot of players feel [joy] is not a recipe for success,” Myers said. “To me, it’s about perspective and enjoying going to work. You know, you can be successful and also enjoy going to work. It doesn’t have to be a grind. Why make it hard when it can be enjoyable? Steve has gotten us to enjoy what we do. He places the emphasis on joy. It’s revealed in our team where there is just a joy in playing basketball.”
To understand the culture that Kerr has established and players like Curry, Thompson and forward Draymond Green have embraced, remember back to the start of last season when Kerr was recovering from offseason back surgery and was unable to run the team. His replacement was Luke Walton, an untested assistant, who at 35 was barely older than the players themselves. Rather than battle against a new, temporary coach, testing his authority as players are wont to do, they rallied behind Walton, showing that winning was more important to them than the silly head games that players too often play. The Warriors won their first 24 games under Walton and were 39-4 when Kerr returned in January.
“Without sounding too sappy I think the players knew they had to step up too and gave Luke and all of us room to grow,” Fraser said. “They gave Luke room to make mistakes after timeouts and in timeout strategy and they just kind of went along with it and they picked up their end. That’s who we are.”
If Durant looked around this weekend, with the window starting to close on his prime, and wondered if it was time to leave Oklahoma City, there was only one team he could pick; one group that could absorb his immense talent, blend around him and be better than ever. In the end, he chose joy over seasons of anxiety and almost. He selected the team that embraced an interim coach in the months after a championship instead of thinking their success had made them entitled to ignore him.
Why would Durant, who was looking for titles after seven all star seasons and an MVP award, go anywhere else?
