Westward-Bound
Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and other NBA stars moving west in search of happiness and success. Does that work?
My phone was buzzing so frequently, it felt like someone was calling me. At midnight. I had to pick it up. And was it a phone call? No. It was a bunch of push notifications, from Twitter, alerting me that NBA insiders Adrian Wojnarowski, Shams Charania, and Chris Haynes were all tweeting. A lot.
Silly me, assuming I could sleep peacefully throughout a night during the NBA trade deadline.
Admittedly, I could turn of Tweet alerts for said journalists, but then how would I know that yet another NBA superstar, Kevin Durant, was heading west? Durant agreed to be traded to the Phoenix Suns just days after Kyrie Irving agreed to be traded to the Dallas Mavericks. We dove into the ways that could go wrong last week, but KD? Durant joining Chris Paul, Devin Booker, and DeAndre Ayton feels like a team primed to win the 2018 NBA Championship.
Cheap shots aside, the 2023 NBA Finals does seem to be near the end of the window that this experiment in Phoenix can work, so Durant pushing for this -as far back as early July- feels odd. Kevin Durant is 34, hardly a spring chicken, but has a game and playing style that could conceivably feel unstoppable through his 38th birthday. He’s a seven-foot-tall sharp-shooter. Even if he isn’t the elite defender he was between 25 (his MVP season) and 30 (when he tore his Achilles), he’s capable of being an impact player longer than most because of just how unique he is offensively, and how physically long he can play defensively. Why waste one of the last few seasons in the NBA on a team that sees the window closing?
On the floor, you could argue that Devin Booker is enough to lure someone. Sure, Chris Paul is aging -much worse than Durant- but Book will take over. You could argue that DeAndre Ayton can help elongate KD’s career. Sure, DA is really upset with the Phoenix front office and staff, but they’re under new ownership now and he can defend the rim behind Durant. But what if it’s none of that?
A friend wrote on this just over six months ago, but I think it carries merrit enough to revisit: is the answer simply that Kevin Durant isn’t happy, and doesn’t seem to know what will make him happy?
Durant left the DMV, where he attended three high schools, and headed to Austin, Texas, to play for Rick Barnes and the Longhorns for a single season before going pro. That’s four schools/programs in a five-year window, searching for the right place, and one of them being halfway across the country from the others. After a successful nine seasons for the Seattle Sonics and Oklahoma City Thunder franchise, Durant still wasn’t happy. He’d been an All-NBA caliber player, an MVP, and carried his team to the NBA Finals before, but he wanted to be on one of the “super teams” of the NBA. He saw the firepower that the Heatles, Cavs, and Warriors were able to assemble and thought he needed that, too.
Then, while playing for Golden State, Durant didn’t get the happiness he yearned for. Sure, the Warriors won back-to-back titles in 2017 and 2018, and KD was the MVP, but even ownership was making jokes about the team “belonging” to Stephen Curry, as he was there before the winning (and to be fair, has done his own winning since). After tearing his Achilles, and watching the Warriors fall to Kawhi Leonard in the Finals without him, Durant was still not feeling appreciated… and dipped.
Durant went to Brooklyn with his friends. Kyrie Irving, DeAndre Jordan, and KD all teamed up to play together. They’re friends, and pulled in friendly Steve Nash. Nash was, reportedly, friendly with Durant in the Bay Area, but was given the keys to the Nets’ Ferrari without any head coaching experience. But it was an attempt to make Durant happy, so it flew. Bringing in James Harden, Durant’s former teammate and training buddy, flew. Shopping Kyrie Irving over the summer, flew.
Moving Durant to Phoenix, as he reportedly may have asked for in July, flew.
Durant adds his name to several future Hall of Fame players that has made a dramatic shift in scenery in the last five calendar years. LeBron James traded in the river on fire for the walk of stars. Kyle Lowry traded his winter coat in for a South Beach cabana. Chris Paul fled the middle of the country for the middle of the desert. DeMar DeRozan hit the River Walk, waived bye to the Alamo for the Windy City, and may really want to be home in the City of Angels. James Harden joined his brothers in Brooklyn and bounced to the City of Brotherly Love. And he may make more moves this off-season.
Star movement happens. But lately, and with some of the stars of late specifically, it seems deeper. Durant, and Irving, each seem (publicly) deeply unhappy with their situation when they’ve left. But, at their new home, they reiterate many of the same cliche statements they said when they got to the previous one. It’s as if the problems have nothing to do with where they play.
Admittedly, I speak from a place of privilege here. There are just 28 NBA cities, I could do my couple of gigs in nearly any city in America. My less-than-1,600 Twitter followers (@painsworth512) rarely, if ever, tell me when I’ve had a bad day in the office (though the Locked On Coogs comment section has had to tell me I’m wearing the wrong hat before…). I don’t know the uphill battle for daily happiness a guy like Durant faces, but I do admit it feels like he’s still searching for it -like many of us are.
I’m not sure what the actionable next steps are. Durant and Pheonix may really win some games, and maybe that fixes it. Or maybe, after winning a pair of Finals MVPs in Phoenix, he’s as upset as he was when he left the Warriors.
Durant appeared to be happy, briefly, in Brooklyn. But he clearly made his way out. Brooklyn, without possession of their own draft picks until the current 8th graders are draft-eligible, would have no reason to push away talent and start over right now. Durant even mentioned he had a work family in Brooklyn. Brooklyn took him in as “damaged goods,” turned him into his old self, and was a shoe size away from beating eventual NBA Champion Milwaulkee in 2021.
Folks wiser than I would say the journey is part of happiness, but where is the happy journeyman? It appears that searching for that happiness continues to be a search for greener grass that has landed Durant in a literal desert. A desert that has convinced Durant that the grass is lush and green, but will inevitably be a desert.
It’s not lost on me that much of this (LeBron, Kyrie, Durant) is coincidentally moving West. The metaphor reminds many of the Gold Rush, land grabs, or the excitement of the new frontier. Pioneers set to move west, navigate the deserts and saloons, before eventually getting to the land full of gold. Theoretically, the “unclaimed” land and gold would solve problems, and offer a chance to start over. But what if the search for what next is more akin to the Donner Party?
The Donners, much like other mid-nineteenth-century pioneers, headed west in search of a better life. Along the way, in carving their own path between the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, the Donners ran into deserts, blizzards, and mountains. They ran out of water and food, resulting in cannibalism at the movement’s lowest points. Less than 50 of the 87 pioneers survived. But when the group departed Missouri? They had high hopes of happiness, success, and land in the west.