2018 NBA Finals: LeBron James, Warriors’ legacy and the 5 biggest takeaways

3. Kevin Durant’s legacy is going to be just fine

When people look back on Kevin Durant’s legendary NBA career, the first thing that will come up is how he left the Oklahoma City Thunder to join a 73-win team and made the NBA unfair for at least half a decade. It’s inevitable. It was the defining moment of his career, though people will read into that differently.

Some will call him a coward and say he ruined the game. Others will defend his right to chase titles, create perhaps the greatest team the NBA has ever seen and live a happier life than the one he had in OKC. (It’s alarming people are more comfortable with super-teams formed by general managers playing strings with people’s lives because it’s more traditional than they are with a player taking matters into his own hands and making a free agency decision, but that’s for another day.)

In any case, no matter where you stand on KD, thinking that his legacy is going to be negatively impacted by what he and the Warriors have done to the league is only true to a certain extent. There’s only so much you can do to erase the memory of a 43-point Finals performance, or a triple-double in the clincher.

Had he stayed in OKC, maybe he finally would’ve broken through and won a title or two. Maybe he and Russell Westbrook would’ve finally climbed to the mountaintop, maybe KD would’ve unseated LeBron as the league’s greatest player and maybe he would’ve put his name in the conversation alongside MJ and King James as the greatest of all time.

That’s a lot of maybes though, and if you watched the Thunder over the last decade, you’d know the chances of all that happening were slim to none. Whether you believe it’s because of the way Westbrook plays or the simple fact that trading James Harden killed a dynasty before it ever really began, toiling away on a Thunder team that might never have won a title wouldn’t have helped his legacy more than the two titles and two Finals MVP awards he’s already racked up on top of a regular season MVP in OKC.

Simply put, if you were expecting KD to become the alpha dog of this league and surpass LeBron or even MJ, you probably would’ve been disappointed. And that’s okay. He’s still going to go down as one of the NBA’s all-time greats, especially because of the position he put himself in.

Public perception can be a dangerous thing, and Kevin Durant is arguably the league’s biggest villain. Even Warriors fans don’t embrace him like they do Curry, because the truth is, he’s the unfair cheat code that doesn’t always mesh with Golden State’s beautiful, movement-heavy offense. He’s the piece that pushed them over the top, and yet somehow, he’s not as intrinsic to their success as Curry or even Draymond.

It almost makes him superfluous, and it makes him downright excessive for those wishing he’d leave to make the NBA fair again. People aren’t high on KD anymore, and for some, every accomplishment from here on out will come with the asterisk of joining a 73-win team to get there.

However, this also fails to account for how far we’ve come in the last 10 years, and how far we’ll have come 10 years from now. There’s no question Durant joining the Warriors was an unprecedented display of the rich getting richer. It was exactly what people accused LeBron James of when he joined Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to create the Miami Heat super-team, only times 10.

But isn’t that kind of the point? NBA pundits hammered LeBron James for doing something MJ never would’ve done, but once the King won two titles, didn’t public perception change? It’s a different scenario, and returning home (and eventually bringing Cleveland a title) certainly helped his image, but the truth is, most of the basketball world outside of Ohio had already begun to forgive James when he was still in South Beach.

Winning usually cures all, but KD’s situation is different. Normally dominance is appreciated, but in the Warriors’ case, everyone’s sick of them and Durant is seen as the linchpin to an unfair dynasty-in-the-making. That’s especially difficult to digest when he joined the very team he coughed up a 3-1 series lead against in the conference finals just a few months prior.

For as long as the Warriors’ reign lasts, he will never be able to appease everyone. His accomplishments will be blemished in the eyes of those who miss unpredictability. When he excels, it will be what’s expected. When he fails, it will be a welcome change.

However, thinking this will mar his ultimate legacy is shortsighted. Ten years from now, players may be even more empowered to make their own decisions than they are now. Super-teams have become the norm, for better or worse, and the player/front office manipulation to create those teams is going to eventually blur the lines of KD’s decision.

Time heals all wounds. No one complains about seeing the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals so many times in the 80s. Why? Because those were all-time great teams and it’s been more than 30 years now. People will eventually be able to appreciate KD and the Warriors down the road, once they’re done being sick of them in the here and now.

There will always be the caveat of joining forces with a Western Conference powerhouse in a way that even LeBron’s South Beach migration did not entail, because it’s the move that truly got the ball rolling on this era of super-teams in a way that no one else’s did.

But when super-teams and NBA friends joining forces becomes the new norm, the history books will look back fondly on a player who’s accomplished as much as KD has — even in this context, on an unassailable behemoth.