Is Kevin Durant the Don Draper of the NBA?
Who is Kevin Durant? A man in a crisis of identity? A twitter troll? A burner account twitter troll? Does he know? A top 15 all-time great? An NBA mercenary? Why continue to indulge these keyboard warriors when you know it makes them and you angrier?
Thesis:
Kevin Durant is the Don Draper of the NBA. A Clear leading man who cannot get out of his own way and is perpetually unhappy no matter what circumstance he’s in therefore creating the very issue he claims to not want any part of.
Opening arguments
STAN’s would say, how are you gonna blame KD, he’s the greatest scoring forward of all-time and a certified bucket, it’s not his fault, it’s the team’s fault, it’s the organization’s fault, they had a bad team culture and you (pointing at me) are a casual! My rebuttal, HE’S KEVIN DURANT, HE IS THE TEAM! Pick any team – Lebron after first Cavs exit, Jordan leaving Bulls 2nd time, Spurs post-Duncan; Everyone of these teams took a major swoon after they left and why? Because that’s how much a player affects a team in the NBA, as James Harden once arrogantly yet eloquently put, he ‘is the system’. No matter how much you want to hate Lebron for continuously signing 1+1 year deals with the Cavs essentially forcing them into making win-now trades, he at least understood the culture he was creating and ensured his team would thrive in it. Kevin Durant? He is constantly and consistently creating a culture that makes everyone unhappy. You want a real Ewing theory candidate? The 24-25’ Suns playing with 62 games of Kevin Durant and 75 games of Booker finished 36-46 (0.44 win%), missed the playoffs and were the unhappiest team of the season. They then trade KD for cents on the dollar (Jalen Green, Dillon the villain, Plowden, Koby Brea & Khaman Maluach) with everyone picking the under on the suns 30.5 wins bet and the Suns finished 45-37 (0.55 win%) and the 7th seed in the West, a +9 win differential from the year before. Is that not crazy? How could KD not make it work with mostly the same team? Are we supposed to believe that Dillon Brooks can create the winning culture that KD cannot?
Kevin Durant is arguably a top15 all-time player, but the last 5-6 years cannot be ignored when discussing his legacy. And course coaching changes, poor management, etc. are things that can derail a season, however the consistent nature of his teams being unhappier wit him than without him are directly his fault to bear. This is not baseball or hockey where true greatness still needs a team to flourish; in the NBA it is the singular team sport where 1 player can have a massive impact on winning. Great players are generally on the court 70-80% of the time and have the ball in their hands much of the time on the court, so Kevin has an outsized role in how his team plays and how his team communicates. If your star player is surly or moody or (allegedly) creates a burner account to shit on his current teammates, this will drag down the mood of the entire team whether on the court or in the locker room. Imagine reading ‘you suck at defense’ or ‘I can’t trust this guy to make a shot’ and then it’s put on blast for the whole world to see and then the alleged person, your teammate, skirts responsibility? Any player can say the right things that ‘it doesn’t bother them’ or they have ‘thick skin’, but the truth is they are really thinking ‘fuck that guy’ and why shouldn’t they? I should not put words in the other Houston Rockets mouth, let’s just say I would be thinking that.
Now to his doppelganger, Don Draper. He had it made and what the show wonderfully did was show the audience he was living a plastic life, society back in the 60’s made a very clear edict: Men work, women stay at home to raise children, buy a home and live the perfect ‘nuclear family’ life. It was a wonderful idea, the man would feel fulfilled by providing for his family and the woman would feel fulfilled being the manager of the home and ensuring the kids were raised appropriately. However the warts were clear, the men drank all day and misogyny ran rampant as they realized they were unhappy no matter how much they climbed the invisible corporate ladder while the women were bored at home realizing their lives revolved around men who rarely cared about them. It was a house of cards bound to crumble at the first site of cracks, sound familiar?
I employed the scientific method to determine if my theory holds true and gave a score out of 5 for how well my observations & comparison comes to my theory.
Observations:
Betty Draper: Did everything right and it didn’t matter = The Oklahoma City Thunder
Dr Faye Miller: Maybe too good for him? Realized Don only like ‘the beginning of things’ = The Warriors
Rachel Menken: A cut above, understood Don had issues = The USA men’s national basketball team
Megan Calvet: Like Don Draper, KD left Brooklyn in shambles, but at least Megan got a $1M cheque out of it! = The Brooklyn Nets
Sylvia Rosen: She was smart enough to move on = The Suns
Suzanne Farrell: Hopeless romantic with no chance KD was going there = The Washington Wizards
Andrea Rhodes: Don had a fever dream where he choked her to death = Definitely Draymond Green
Betty Draper
She was every bit the housewife any man would have wanted in the 1960’s: flawlessly beautiful, a stay-at-home mother, a woman that adores her husband, looks at him dotingly like he’s the image of perfection, dresses up for work events and looks the other way no matter what transgression her husband puts in front of her. Much like the Oklahoma City Thunder that did everything in its power to give Durant whatever he wanted or needed. It is now well-known, with Sam Presti coming from the Spurs culture, that reporters and journalists were kept at arms length with OKC, they did not have the typical comfort of asking about a player’s health or salary questions and expect a clear answer. Instead they were greeted with silence or pivoted to another more OKC friendly line of answers.
On the court, yes there were warts, specifically trading James Harden either thinking they knew the salary cap better than anyone or not believing in his talent and his running mate, Russel Westbrook, was a walking contradiction: A clear winning player with otherworldly athleticism but with certain flows both physical (shooting) and mental (turnovers, defensive lapses, not a true PG). Yet they were successful, making the playoffs 6/7 seasons, the Finals once and conference finals 4x. They likely would have had a 2nd Finals appearance had it not been for nuclear ‘Game 6 Klay’ and I hate to say it, a clear choke job by KD in the last 2 games of that series.
OKC would have done anything to keep KD in town yet it wasn’t meant to be, it was the first crack in the perfect KD cookie shell when he spurned OKC for the Warriors and much like Don’s split with Betty, it was a sign of things to come.
Comparison score 3/5
Dr Faye Miller
A talented strategist for a consumer-research company, Dr Miller is shown to be Don’s equal at least in the board room when her talents are made clear. After multiple advances they do end up together as no one can resist Don’s charms, however the more they are together the more Faye realizes Don isn’t all that he seems with Don eventually telling Faye his secret. In the end, it doesn’t matter as Don cheats on Faye anyways (kind of Like Durant talking to Kyrie at the all-star game?) and Faye leaves Megan with an ominous yet prophetic warning that Don (ahem KD) “only likes the beginning of things”.
Comparison score 4/5 – I was originally only going to give this a 3/5 but with Faye uttering one of the most important lines in the show’s history that Don “only likes the beginning on things” feels almost like something Steve Kerr would have said to Steph once they knew their time with KD was over. They got what they needed from him, 2 championships and lived a happier life without him because they realized the theoretical Kevin Durant doesn’t exist, only the real one.
Rachel Menken
The inherited owner of the Menken’s department store, she is as rich as they get back in the 60’s. She is also quite intelligent as sees through Don’s charms quite easily. They have a brief love affair and seem like a good match for each other but at the end of season 1 when Don, due to Pete Campbell’s black mail, tries to run away with Rachel, she realizes she’s just his best option right now and not truly in love. She leaves him and is all the better for it.
This is the USA men’s national team, they know Kevin Durants strengths. He’s a weapon, the ultimate weapon, like Brock Lesnar just point him in a direction and click ‘shoot’. He does not want the smoke or the politics of the NBA or their teams, he just wants to hoop. The USMNT knows this and gives him want he wants so they can get what they want.
Comparison score 5/5
Megan Calvet
Ms. “Zou Bisou Bisou” herself. Megan was the beautiful receptionist batting her big eyes and Don all day long, she was right there but just out of reach. All Don had to do was get his pesky wife out of the way and when Don saw Megan hug his daughter, he knew, this one’s definitely the one. No more drinking. No more cheating. I promise. She’s the one.
Oh, the Brooklyn Nets, how they gave everything for a bag of magic beans. Kevin & kyrie in the same season?! A James Harden trade later and the greatest theoretical team (thank you Zach Lowe) of all time?!? Ahh but it wasn’t meant to be. KD could not wrangle in his on-court girlfriend Kyrie, and so they were destined to implode all culminating with Kevin awkwardly taking every chance to not pick James Harden for his all-star team.
So why was Durant so unhappy? Yes Kyrie refused to play due to COVID (I can’t even), but a true leader would have and should have managed this situation. At this point KD was 32 years old, but he could not handle doing the heavy leadership lifting of being the bad guy and getting his team in order. Not to mention he forced out Kenny Atkinson for his preferred coach, Steve Nash, and got him fired as well! The results were obvious and Durant was eventually traded.
Comparison score 4/5
Sylvia Rosen
The apartment housewife that could not get enough of Don Drapers advances. They both had kids in their own marriages, and this was doomed to fail but the gravitas of Don was too much to withstand. Just like the Suns when Matt Ishibia bought them, the Suns were in negotiations with Brooklyn but would not budge when the Nets wanted both Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson. Did Ishbia care? Hell no! He shipped them both out along with 5 first rounders as part of a 4-team trade for Kevin Durant and TJ Warren and the results were 1 playoff series win in 3 seasons. Ultimately the Suns decided to move on after their disastrous 24-25’ 36-win season, cut their losses and sent Durant packing to Houston in a 7-team trade.
Picking nits, you could easily say this team was poorly constructed and had no big men other than Jusuf Nurkic (woof) and Drew Eubanks but he had Devin Booker in his prime and this was his chosen team, he wanted to go there and knew what this would cost the team in terms of talent and assets but as they say, some people just want to watch the world burn.
Comparison score 4/5
Suzanne Farrell
Hopeless romantic with no chance KD was going there = The Washington Wizards
Andrea Rhodes
Don had a fever dream where he choked her to death = Definitely Draymond Green
I had to write these two again because God they are amazing!
Comparison score 5/5 for both!
Conclusions
In the end when tallying up my scores the total is 30/35 for an 86% positive score! Don Draper is the Kevin Durant of the NBA and to me it’s a bit somber because even though both the show and the person gave us incredible content, I do yearn for the day that Kevin could be the leader of a team I think he has that in him and maybe Houston will be the team (although his burner account tells me that is not likely) so all I am left with is the sage wisdom of Carmy Berzatto, “to break patterns, you gotta break patterns”.
