There's no downside to Kevin Durant on Warriors
OAKLAND -- In a way, this particular Kevin Durant smile means more than the thousands that are almost sure to come in his new basketball paradise.
Smiling after one-sided wins is obvious, involuntary even. But this is the third day of training camp with the Golden State Warriors, the getting-to-know-you stage that finally has arrived after so many months of discourse about his decision to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder behind.
Durant walks off the practice floor, sweat and joy dripping off his blue and gold jersey as he greets one of his closest associates and friends, Charles Terrell. The Nike executive pinches Durant’s left arm and then does it again for full effect. After a short beat, the joke sinks in.
“Is it real?” Terrell says with a grin.
Durant smiles again. This hoops dream is getting more real by the day.
‘Super’ Super Team
The concept of super teams has always been flawed, if only because it’s too simplistic. Stockpiling superstars is never a bad approach, but the other factors that lead to championship basketball still matter in the end: the supporting cast, the coach, health and chemistry.
As super teams go, the Warriors will enter this season with the kind of formula that should strike fear into the rest of the NBA because, well, it’s not the norm.
Their core already has proved to be title worthy, with back-to-back MVP Stephen Curry, two-time All-Star Klay Thompson, one-time All-Star Draymond Green and one-time All-Star Andre Iguodala still on board. Adding a former MVP such as Durant, who looked at times last postseason to be ready to regain his status as the league’s top talent, and there’s an embarrassment of riches even beyond what we’ve seen in recent years.
From the Boston Celtics group that joined forces in 2007 to the Miami Heat three years later and even the ill-fated Los Angeles Lakers of the 2012-13 season, there was an element of the unknown in that inaugural year together because the superstars had never actually played together before. That dynamic doesn’t exist here, and what a luxury it will be.
Yes, Durant will have to fit in — a manageable task if ever there was one. But this was a super team before he arrived, with Curry, Thompson and Green all deemed All-Star starters just seven months ago and the Warriors going an unprecedented 73-9 before blowing that 3-1 Finals lead to the Cleveland Cavaliers in June. Never mind the franchise-record 67 wins and championship the season before.
Now Durant, who returned to MVP-level form last season after a broken bone in his right foot limited him to 27 games in 2014-15, enters stage left and says everything just feels right.
Steve Kerr compares Kevin Durant to Gary Johnson
“I’m just fitting in,” Durant says. “I try to adjust to them, you know? I’m the new guy, so I’m trying to adjust. It’s been going well. This offense is not predicated on just doing one thing. It’s a bunch of guys who can shoot, pass, dribble, make plays, and I’m one of those types of guys. It’s not as difficult as you might think. You’re just out there playing a game.
“You never know who (will hurt you). That’s what makes it so dangerous. From Steph to Klay to me, to S-Dot (Shaun Livingston) to Draymond to Andre, all of us can go and take over the game. It’s not just about scoring; it’s about just having an impact. And I think that’s what everybody brings.”
Only in this landscape could a talent so marvelous as Durant even dare to talk of fitting in — even if that’s not even remotely the case. For all the focus on Curry’s latest season, the record 402 three-pointers and league-leading 30.1 points per game average and playmaking skills to boot (6.7 assists per game), Durant wasn’t all that far behind.
He was third in the league in scoring (28.2 points per game), even shooting better than Curry overall in the regular season (50.5%, compared with 50.4%) while also averaging 8.2 rebounds and 5.0 assists per game. He was the leading scorer in the postseason, averaging 28.4 points in 18 games (Curry led the Warriors at 25.1 and was eighth overall).
Durant’s latest Olympics experience was more of the same: with Curry opting to skip the Rio de Janeiro experience in order to rest his ailing right knee, Durant led Team USA in scoring by a monumental margin (19.4 points per game, with Carmelo Anthony second at 12.1; Thompson was fifth at 9.9, while Green played the second-fewest minutes of any national team player).
All of which says nothing of Durant’s defensive capabilities. The Thunder’s seven-game Western Conference finals loss to the Warriors reminded the masses how his combination of length and speed can cause opponents fits, and the reunion with former Thunder assistant and current Warriors defensive guru Ron Adams should only help on that front. As Warriors coach Steve Kerr made clear in the early days of camp, Durant is far too good to merely fit in.
“He blends in pretty well with what we already do,” Kerr says. “As I said, we haven’t put in a lot of our offense, but he dominates play when he’s on the floor. He’s a dominant offensive player, which is a great thing. He’s a great playmaker. I think that’s what’s really intriguing about putting him with these guys, with Steph and Klay and Draymond, is you’ve got Andre, Shaun, you’ve got multiple playmakers.
“And if you move the ball, we should be able to cut down on turnovers as long as we don’t make it about the show and we make it about execution. We should be able to cut back on our turnovers this year, should be able to get better shots, to compete at a high level, but to execute at a high level too, which you have to do — in June especially.”
Steph Curry comes to Draymond Green's defense
Being motivated
That latter lesson likely will be heard from now until season’s end, with Kerr taking full advantage of the chance to remind his players why they fell short of successfully defending the 2014-15 title.
“To be quite frank, last year was kind of hard to coach,” says Kerr, who was referring more to his players than he was to the back problems that forced him to miss half the regular season. “The first year was a lot easier to coach the team, because we hadn’t won anything. It was real easy for me to come in and say, ‘We’re being loose with the ball. That stuff doesn’t work. I know (because) I’ve been through this (as a player who won five championships).’ Last year, we’re winning every game, and we’re getting sloppy. And I’m like, ‘We’ve got to do this, and we’ve got to do that,’ and it’s like deaf ears, because we’re 60-7 or something and we’d won the championship the year before. There was a sense of, ‘We got this.’ But I think we did learn against OKC and Cleveland that if you don’t execute, if you don’t take care of the ball, you can’t score in that kind of environment, you’re in some trouble.”
As solutions go, Durant is as good as it gets.
Not only will he have the personal objective, the goal of winning a first title after eight seasons of falling short (including one Finals appearance and three conference finals appearances with the Thunder). But he’ll be surrounded by an All-Star cast of characters that will be plenty motivated, too, one that has made it abundantly clear early on that the villain role will fit quite nicely.
Just like Durant himself.
“I shot a lot today (at practice), and Draymond told me I wasn’t aggressive enough, so that’s great for me,” Durant says with a laugh and yet another smile. “Everybody is trying to make me feel more comfortable. But coming from me, I’m just trying to help everybody else out. But when you have teammates that are selfless and who want you to do well, it shows, man, and it shows out on the floor.
“That’s why they wanted me here. They want me to come out here and be myself. They don’t want me to be timid. ... I’m just going to be myself.”