Durant's Legacy in Question?
So what happens when you take away Kevin Durant from the Oklahoma City Thunder? They still make the playoffs and Russell Westbrook becomes the league MVP while averaging a triple-double for the season. Add in the fact that the Golden State Warriors went on a 12-game winning streak without Durant and you have a lot of pundits questioning the value of one of the league’s best players. According to those pundits, the combination of the above facts have now damaged Durant’s legacy. Oh how quickly we forget how the media enjoys to bury a player and then hop back on the bandwagon.
Let’s bring LeBron James into the discussion for a second. Nowadays everyone will pretend that LeBron wasn’t drowning in scorn and ridicule when he made the decision to take his talents to South Beach. Now I won’t say that LeBron and Durant’s maneuvers were the same, but the intentions were. Both of these great players couldn’t win a championship in their original cities and decided to stack the deck in their favor in order to win one. You can argue about going to the team that beat you or moving to a 40-something win Miami team all you want, but their intentions were the same. And just like Durant, LeBron got all the hate in the world. But that all changed when LeBron added two MVP awards, two championship rings and two Finals MVPs to his résumé. All of a sudden the once dead Jordan discussion came back with a vengeance. And now that LeBron delivered the title to Cleveland, the Jordan discussion is all anyone wants to talk about. And that’s what Durant is banking on folks. He’s banking on winning a couple of rings and all of the hatred going away.
Now back to the original question. Is Durant’s legacy forever damaged now that Westbrook has emerged as a legendary player without him? No. He didn’t leave OKC because Westbrook was a terrible player. He wanted to stack the deck in his favor in order to win championships. Westbrook’s success is meaningless to him. If anything, this makes the Thunder organization look horrible as they failed to cash in while having three MVP-level stars plus an all-star big in Serge Ibaka. The only thing that can hurt Durant’s legacy is if the Golden State experiment fails. And I don’t mean just this year. I mean if he fails to capture that elusive championship during his entire tenure in the Bay Area. The media, fans and former players love to boil things down to championships. So his legacy will be judged by rings and not the situation he left behind. And although a lot of people hate Durant for joining the Warriors, his decision will be justified if the Warriors win. Westbrook can win the next three MVP awards, but Durant and his legacy will be just fine as long as the Warriors win championships while he’s there.
