Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors are not unstoppable

When LeBron James announced The Decision, I was sitting along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area. The news reached me a few days later, when I reached civilization (Stanley, Idaho, population: 63) and the end of that two-week backpacking trip. I sat at the small bakery in the center of town, enjoyed a cinnamon roll as big as my face and mentally grappled with a far off NBA that was now profoundly different.

What I remember most about that breakfast — besides the mountains, coffee, exhaustion, good company, sore feet, aforementioned cinnamon roll, warm sun, and cold breeze — was a profound sense of defeat. LeBron James. Dwyane Wade. Chris Bosh. Three of the best players in the league joining forces in single-minded pursuit of a championship. There was certainly no hope for my Indiana Pacers, let alone the rest of the league. Imagining multiple seasons of simply waiting for the Miami Heat to break down with age, I could feel the fun being drained away from professional basketball.

Just under a year later, I sat in a bar in that same small Idaho town, savoring PBR tall-boys and celebrating the Dallas Mavericks who successfully defended all of us from the inevitable.

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In a few days, Kevin Durant will officially sign the contract to which he has already agreed to in principle. He will join the Golden State Warriors and another thick shadow of inevitability will fall across the NBA. Or at least it will seem that way.

Durant is a perfect fit for the Warriors. Even if they asked him to do nothing but fill Harrison Barnes’ shoes, Durant is a better shooter, a better occasional-post-that-random-dude-up scorer, and with his length is at least as capable as Barnes was of defending power forwards — maintaining the viability of The Death Lineup. Then there are all the things he can do that Barnes can’t — score efficiently in isolations against anyone, run the pick-and-roll, lead the league in scoring, win MVP, and all that.

The Warriors were one of the best teams the league had ever seen and he will undoubtedly make them better. But when you’re already so close to the top, there just isn’t as much room for growth.

I would posit that Durant doesn’t actually add a ton to the Warriors odds of winning a title next season, at least not numerically. The Warriors will begin the 2016-17 season as overwhelming favorites to win the title — a position they also held at the beginning of last season, throughout the greatest regular season in league history, at the beginning of the playoffs, and pretty much at every point throughout the playoffs excepting the middle of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder. The day after they lost Game 7 to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Warriors opened as favorites to win the 2016-17 NBA Championship, well before Durant made his decision to join the team.

In one sense, Durant is far less valuable to the Warriors than he would be to the Thunder or the rest of the league. His responsibility will be decreased, reducing his production (even if it becomes more efficient). Every bit of responsibility that he does assume will be reducing the production of Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Stephen Curry (even if it makes them more efficient as well). The team will likely be better off, but Durant will have less to do with that “better” than he would have somewhere else.

In another sense, Durant is even more valuable to the Warriors than he would be to anyone else. Although they will likely not get maximum production from Durant because of the team context, and thus likely not get maximum value from the dollars they pay him, he does increase their chances of winning a title, even if it’s slightly. Growth is hard to come by at the top. If Durant is the difference between the Warriors entering the season with an 18 percent chance of winning the title (as they did according to 538’s preseason projections last year) and a 30-35 percent chance of winning the title (as an early projection of them at 66 wins might imply), that’s a small percentage with enormous implications.

And still, it is far from inevitable.

It is easy to look at this team and their talent and let your mind sprint to the seemingly obvious conclusions. A slippery slope awaits hurried thinking. The Heat’s Big 3 were supposed to be unstoppable; they were not. This Cavs Big 3 was supposed to be the best offense the NBA had ever seen; they were not. The 2004 Detroit Pistons were supposed to be helpless against the Los Angeles Lakers; they were not. Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks had a young Dwyane Wade against the ropes and were supposed to be champions; they were not.

If there is a stronger argument against an assumption of inevitability than what LeBron James and the Cavaliers just did to the Warriors in the NBA Finals, I have yet to see it.

These Warriors with Durant are not those Heat, those Cavs, those Lakers, or those Mavericks. Heck, they are not even the Warriors who just lost in the NBA Finals. All that is to say, Golden State will be favorites next season, overwhelmingly so. They will make presumptions on history and the expiration of unbreakable records. But the Warriors are not inevitable — there is no such thing — a fact that sports is delightfully willing to offer frequent reminders of. Even if we can’t see the mechanism of a potential loss right now, it’s there. It might never be engaged but there is always a catastrophic flaw, if not an organic one than the simple push and pull of bad luck.

Favorites lose, even historically great ones. For the rest of the league, which is struggling to make sense of a new basketball landscape, that should be enough to hold out hope.

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