Wait, I thought Phoenix was supposed to be a superteam??
As I watch the Minnesota Timberwolves on the verge of sweeping the Phoenix Suns out of the playoffs today, I’m reminded yet again of how difficult winning a championship is even if you have a “superteam”.
The Suns boast an electric trio of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal. In terms of All-Star game appearances, Booker (3), Beal (3), and Durant (13) have combined for 19. KD is a former MVP with four scoring titles to his name, while Beal and Booker are two of the best scoring guards of the modern era.
So with that big 3, how are they down 0-3 in the first round to Minnesota?
I think this is why the hate the Golden State Warriors received for adding KD back in 2016 was both understandable and also quite assumptive. It was like the basketball world effectively called the Dubs cheaters for stacking the deck by adding an MVP to a 73 win team. But we can see from Durant’s post-Warriors journey that it’s not as simple as cobbling together All-Stars and watching the titles roll in.
He did team up with James Harden and Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn in a short lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to take over the Eastern Conference.
“We just didn’t get on the court enough. I think when you see James, Kyrie and myself, it was amazing basketball for 17 games though,” Durant joked. “In order for you to win a championship and be a great team, you just need more time on the floor.”
The ‘Big 3,’ who all now play on different teams and forced their way out of Brooklyn, combined to play a total of only 16 games in just over a single year span. Outside of injuries to Durant and Harden, the main component of one of the biggest NBA’s ‘What If’s’ in league history was Irving’s vaccination refusal. His decision resulted in the now Dallas Mavericks guard playing in only 29 regular season games during the 2021-22 season.
And now in his second year in Phoenix, it’s clear that they don’t have the juice to compete at the highest levels of the West. That’s why it worked out for both parties (the Warriors won another title without KD while Durant was able to exercise his personal autonomy with his decision to leave), but the fact that a player as dominant as KD is still sitting on two rings will always be a fan’s “What If” surrounding his exit.
Per CBS Sports:
Unless the Suns become the first team in history to recover from a 3-0 deficit to win a best-of-seven series, Durant will move to 2-4 in six playoff series since leaving the Golden State Warriors in 2019 — point at which he began trying to superteam his way to post-Stephen Curry validation.
Durant, individually, has acquitted himself just fine. Shock-jock hot takes notwithstanding, he never had anything to prove in that regard in the first place. He was sensational before teaming up with Curry, and he’s been sensational after. But the playoff losses are piling up because, even for a scorer as gifted as Durant, basketball becomes very difficult when you’re going at it largely alone.
But as Durant himself pointed out after his Brooklyn exit, maybe it’s a waste of time to do the What If game:
“I mean, that’s just a pointless exercise, in my opinion, to think about what could have been. What happened. That’s what I thought about: what actually happened. The reality of it.”
“We didn’t have enough time together. That’s just it,” he continued. “Guys wanted to go their separate ways. We tried our hardest to, you know, salvage everything and everything together. We had three or four different teams [from] when I signed here until when I left. But at the end of the day, I enjoyed coming to work, playing for, being a part of this community and playing, representing Brooklyn; regardless of what went on, what was said or how I felt, I still came to work.”
And at the end of the day, we’ve all gotta go to work. #MESSAGE
