The Thunder may only have one more shot to win a title with Kevin Durant leading the way. How will they maximize the opportunity?
Kevin Durant is done for the season and so are the Oklahoma City Thunder. Unless they can somehow avoid the Warriors in the first round, which seems nearly impossible at this stage, the Thunder will be ejected from the playoffs quickly. It will be a bitter end to a bitter season.
They'd entered the season as favorites -- or as close to favorites as one can be in a West in which the Spurs are back-to-back conference champs -- and suffered one bad break after another. That Russell Westbrook has led OKC to pole position for No. 8 without Durant and now Serge Ibaka is heartening, and the journey's been entertaining. But this isn't what the Thunder set out to do. They wanted more.
Now the franchise is faced with an incredibly nerve-wracking summer. Durant can become a free agent in 2016. He's never let on that he wants to leave Oklahoma City, and in fact his sentiments seem quite the opposite. He seems to truly love OKC and (most of) his Thunder brethren. But that doesn't mean he won't listen to other teams, other cities, other players in July, 2016. That doesn't mean he won't follow in LeBron's footsteps and look to build a superpower in a more glamorous city.
Thunder GM Sam Presti doesn't have to do anything. OKC is already a contender for the 2015-16 championship without making any moves, provided Durant, Westbrook and Ibaka are healthy for opening night. While there's no guarantee a title would keep KD in OKC, that has to be goal (as it is every year). There's just a hard deadline this time. Either way, you want a championship to convince him to stay, or you want to squeeze one out of him before he leaves. So, while the Thunder are already great when healthy, the team really faces a mandate to do everything in its power to be the greatest.
Keep in mind that this will be the first season the Thunder will have ever paid the luxury tax. OKC is currently about $2 million over the threshold, primarily due to taking on Dion Waiters' contract in February. (Waiters is shooting 39 percent as a Thunderian.) At the deadline, the Thunder could have shipped out Reggie Jackson and Kendrick Perkins for some salary cap breathing room, but instead brought back Enes Kanter, Steve Novak and Kyle Singler. That was when it looked like Durant would be available the rest of the season. You wonder if Presti would have gotten under the line if he knew KD would stay out.
The tax has been an issue of concern for the Thunder for a while now, going back to the James Harden deal that looks worse every day. That move remains defensible from a strict team-building standpoint. With Durant and Westbrook in place, having another potential scoring champ on a max deal is a wasted resource. It's much more efficient in a capped-resource environment to allot those resources to another need, like size and defense. That's exactly what Presti did, he invested in Ibaka, kept Perkins around and used one of the picks from the Harden trade on Steven Adams. But it's hard to continually justify a trade that sees you dealing a future MVP contender for Kevin Martin and picks.
What OKC is facing with Durant could really be a combination of two LeBron James heartbreaks. James left Cleveland because the Cavaliers couldn't get him a title, and he left Miami (at least in part) because management was reluctant to pay high tax bills. That doesn't mean Durant will follow LeBron's path. But you'd better believe that's what Presti fears, and what the Thunder are trying to prevent.
(There's a special irony in Durant's future causing this sort of drama in OKC now given how trumped up KD's quiet extension with the Thunder in 2010 was played up in juxtaposition to LeBron's loud abandonment of Cleveland. Unfortunately, the idiots who used Durant's perceived humility to bash LeBron five years ago will just claim KD has turned into a diva instead of admitting their logic was weak all along.)
So how can the Thunder prevent heartbreak in 2016?
There's no cap space to go out and land a major free agent like Kevin Love. OKC doesn't seem to have the chips to cash in on a major trade without losing Ibaka or, god forbid, Westbrook. You don't trade a once-in-a-lifetime star like Durant early just to make sure you get something for him. (That works for All-Star level talent like Love, not potential G.O.A.T.s.)
All Presti can really do is all he's done since trading Harden: Try to make nifty moves around the margins, cover the weaknesses of a KD-Westbrook team as best as possible and hope for the best. Maybe those prayers will finally be answered. Perhaps the Basketball Gods will smile down on the Thunder in 2016 as they once did in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Otherwise, Oklahoma City might find itself back at square one, trying to figure out how to win without Durant permanently.
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