Kevin Durant-Stephen Curry Warriors amazing, but short-lived show

Steve Kerr had it right, even if nobody wanted to listen to it. This was late in the evening of June 8, 2018, in Cleveland, maybe an hour after the Warriors had dismissed the Cavaliers 108-85, sweeping LeBron James and company and winning their second straight NBA title, third in four years.

“Honestly, I hope you took a good look at them,” Kerr said, with admiration more than defiance, although that was in the mixture, too. “We may never see something like this ever again. And it’s been beautiful to watch.”

Kerr was merely speaking the truth, even if the benefit of 20/20 hindsight allows us to wonder if maybe he knew that he’d already seen the best of the Steph Curry/Kevin Durant/Klay Thompson partnership. A year later the Warriors would make it back to the Finals but Durant would blow out his Achilles. Soon all three partners had grievous injuries that would cost them all the 2018-19 season, and soon Durant would seek exile in Brooklyn.

Kerr couldn’t know all of that on June 8, 2018. He just knew what he’d seen, what he’d borne witness to, what he’d worked with, what he enjoyed, and he was urging the rest of us to enjoy it to the max, too.

I wonder if we did.

I doubt we did.

Most of the three years of the Durant/Curry/Thompson alliance, the rest of basketball was alternately filled with Warriors fatigue (as five straight trips to the Finals will invite) and with full-blown resentment that Durant, unable to take out the Warriors in Oklahoma City, had joined forces with the enemy. That sat wrong with a lot of people.

In truth: it still sits wrong with a lot of people.

So instead of marveling at what the Warriors were doing those three years, they instead starred in one of the great heel turns this side of the WWE. There was a time, after all, when the Warriors were a fresh-faced batch of upstarts, the Splash Brothers (with Draymond Green serving as their Luca Brasi) who won a title on their own in 2015, won a record 73 games and fell a game shy in 2016.

It was impossible not to root for them.

Ironically, at the same time, it was impossible not to root for Durant, because by 2016 he was able to make a strong case for himself as 1A or 1B to LeBron for best player on the planet. His game was smooth, effortless, beautiful, an inside-outside mélange of wonder and coordination and smarts that was simply mesmerizing. The Warriors were hugely likeable. KD was hugely likeable.

Then KD joined the Warriors.

And they were instantly detestable. At least in a lot of basketball precincts.

“You can’t force people to feel a certain way,” Kerr said late in the 2016-17 season. “We can only play to our best and hope people appreciate that.”

In Oakland, they did. In San Francisco, they did. In the places across America where people had already adopted the Warriors as their own regardless of geography, they did. They appreciated the way the Warriors blitzed through that season at 67-15, then the way they went 16-1 in the playoffs, the only blemish a proud Game 4 stand by the defending-champ-but-doomed-to-expire Cavs in the Finals.

It was a astonishing show. Curry (25.3), Durant (25.1) and Thompson (22.3) averaged nearly 73 points as a threesome. They were unguardable, if not quite unbeatable. When they defended the title a year later it was more of a struggle until the very end. Then they simply crushed the Cavs.

And yet …

Start a casual conversation with basketball fans the next time you’re at a saloon. Ask who the best NBA teams of all time were. You’ll get the usual suspects: the Russell Celtics. The ’72 Lakers. The ’86 Celtics. The ’96 Bulls. If you’re in Manhattan maybe there’ll be a few votes for the ’70 Knicks.

But the KD/Curry Warriors?

On Tuesday, the Warriors and the Nets met at Barclays Center in what may well be a preview of next June’s NBA Finals and may also have been a showdown of the likely 1-2 finishers in the MVP race, since Curry and Durant are both off to splendid starts. It was sure to be a hell of a show. And should also have served as a reminder.

It really was beautiful to watch them play basketball music together. Even as short as it lasted.