I have a couple posts in various states of readiness that I figured I would focus on for today.
Until I turned on the local news at 7:00 AM this morning to catch the weather – storms were blowing through at the time – and saw a blurb on the crawl at the bottom of the screen saying Kevin Durant had been traded to the Phoenix Suns.
WHAT?!?!
I jumped over to ESPN and got the details.
Holy shit!
There are several NBA podcasts in my queue and I try to listen to at least a few each week. There had been rumblings that maybe the Suns would look into getting Durant. It seemed like more of a “Here’s something that conceptually could happen, but the odds against it are pretty high” type of rumor, though.
Then the damn thing happened! And I love it.
I don’t love it because I’m a fan of the Suns or KD or the Nets. Rather, I love the chaos and the jaw-dropping, HOLY SHIT-edness of it. This is one of those sports moments that I will remember for a long time and that will reverberate around the league for years.
You have Phoenix, with a new, aggressive ownership group who are only in place because their previous majority owner was a really bad guy, wasting no time in giving the franchise, which was in the NBA Finals two years ago but faltered in last season’s playoffs, a massive jolt for another chance to win a title.
You have Brooklyn, who went all-in with the highly combustable trio of KD, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden, throwing in the towel, now trading all three away in about a year. We will learn more about their motivation in the coming hours and days, but it sure seems like the majority owner grew tired of that group’s lack of commitment and love of drama and decided to do a hard reset as quickly as possible. I love that he was super petty and refused to send Kyrie to the Lakers, his preferred destination.
And you have Durant, who orchestrated bringing that group together in Brooklyn, also realizing it wasn’t going to work and agreeing to do what he did when he left Oklahoma City for Golden State and join an established group as the gun hired to put them over the top.
None of this seemed likely or even possible until late last week, when Kyrie requested a trade. A request which came just a couple days after he said the Nets were in great shape because there were no guys on the roster who were “half-in.” Good luck with that time bomb, Dallas!
I had been keenly awaiting this year’s trade deadline since the fall, figuring the Pacers would move veterans to augment their rebuild. Then they won a lot more than expected until Tyrese Haliburton got hurt, re-signed Myles Turner, and chose to only make some minor deals.
It was still a monumentally entertaining trade window, with a number of pretty significant trades that were then overshadowed by Brooklyn cleaning house.
Well, done, NBA! A+!