I hate the fact Kevin Durant decided to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder to join the Golden State Warriors, I absolutely hate it. I also know it is his right to make such a move, and I spent Monday celebrating the fact that we live in a free country and we all have the ability to make the same types of decisions with respect to our own lives.
The two positions are not mutually exclusive; however, listening to the debate about Durant's move, one would think they are. It is possible to hate a decision a person makes but also respect his or her right to make said decision.
I'd say "No kidding, Captain Obvious," except, it apparently isn't all that obvious judging from what I've read and heard from people who decided to offer an opinion.
I also found it amazingly ironic that on a day we were celebrating freedom, two sides of the debate lined up to argue that either (1) Durant shouldn't be allowed to go to Golden State or (2) people shouldn't be criticizing him for doing so.
By the end of the day my head hurt listening to this nonsense, but it really is pretty simple: Durant is free to leave Oklahoma City and people are free to criticize him for it, mostly because that's how we do things in this country.
And here's the other thing _ criticism of Durant for leaving Oklahoma City does not equal claiming that he doesn't have the right to leave and join whatever team he wants.
As a basketball fan I hate that Durant has left Oklahoma City to join the Warriors, too, and wish he would have made the decision to stay with the Thunder.
Warriors-Thunder was becoming one of the best rivalries in the NBA and the games were almost always fun to watch because both teams were so good offensively.
I hate that we've lost that rivalry, and I think had Durant stayed put (and Russell Westbrook stayed after next season), Warriors-Thunder could have become similar to Lakers-Celtics of the 1980s or Pistons-Bulls of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Also, while the NBA is losing a great rivalry, the Warriors are losing one of the main obstacles standing between them and total domination of the Western Conference for the next four or five years.
I know the West has good teams _ the Spurs, the Clippers and the Trail Blazers are all pretty good, but none of them were as good as the Thunder _ who seemed to be on the upward trajectory, and none seemed nearly as capable of matching buckets with the Warriors.
Also, as a competitor and someone who has played or coached sports my whole life, I hate the fact that Durant joined the team he was unsuccessful in his attempts to beat.
It was as if the Warriors were the last big obstacle he had to conquer to conquer the West, and if it were me, I would want to beat them, not join them. The journey to the top is a big part of it and makes you appreciate how hard it is to get the top of the mountain a little more.
Michael Jordan finally beat the Bad Boy Pistons on his way to his first title after several years of losing to them. If you hear him talk these days about it, he says it was something he needed to do to get to that next level.
Durant is seemingly taking the easy way out by joining the best team in the Western Conference, the team that has won the NBA title within the last two seasons and most importantly, the one team he can't beat.
This, by the way, is precisely why this situation is not the same as LeBron James and "The Decision" to go to Miami.
James had taken a bad Cleveland team and put it on his back and carried it to the NBA Finals, but Cavaliers ownership never committed to making the team around him better.
And Miami wasn't the team Cleveland couldn't beat _ it was a team that was willing to build a championship team around James.
In the three years before James arrived, the Heat made the playoffs twice and were knocked out in the first round both years. They were clearly not an obstacle to James and not likely to be anything more than a mid-level playoff team in the weak Eastern Conference.
Oklahoma City, on the other hand, was good enough to win a title this year and didn't mostly because Durant and the team's other star, Westbrook, shrunk in the biggest moments in the Warriors series.
The Thunder would have started next year as one of the three teams favored to win the title along with the Cavaliers and Warriors, and may actually have been the best of the three.
Even without Durant, the Thunder will still be very good. They will make the playoffs and probably get to the second round. When James left the Cavaliers, they went from a team that had won 127 games in his final two years to a team that won 40 in the next two after he left.
So the situations are not the same _ great players have left their teams for a variety of reasons in every sport, but few I can think of have left their team to join up with their chief nemesis in order to ride another star's coattails to a title.
All of that being said, the beauty of living here is that everyone is free to make choices about how to live their lives, and that includes Durant. He decided life in the city by the bay with Stephen Curry as his teammate was more desirable than life in Oklahoma City alongside Westbrook, and he said he wanted a change of scenery as well.
I don't like that Durant went from Oklahoma City to Golden State, but that doesn't mean I don't understand his right to make that decision.
It just means I liked watching Thunder-Warriors games. Those two teams were so even and so loaded with superstars, but now that won't be the case.
