No shade, KD, but Bird 'couldn't imagine' joining Magic's Lakers
Kevin Durant’s decision to leave the Oklahoma City Thunder and join the Golden State Warriors in free agency has turned the basketball world on its head. The move created a new NBA superpower headlined by Durant and Stephen Curry, the winners of the league’s last three Most Valuable Player awards, and joined by All-NBA stalwarts Draymond Green and Klay Thompson in a core of 28-and-under stars poised to keep Golden State — winners of the 2015 NBA title, runners-up in 2016, with a record-setting 73-win campaign in between — entrenched as championship favorites for years to come. (Pending, of course, a collective-bargaining-agreement-prompted blow-up.)
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The decision has come under quite a bit of fire from both fans and legendary players-turned-commentators like Charles Barkley and Reggie Miller, who have argued that Durant’s choice to leave Oklahoma City — where he’d become a superstar, four-time scoring champion and league MVP, where he’d gone to four Western Conference finals in six years, and where he’d put this same Warriors team on the brink of elimination before a furious Golden State comeback that knocked off the Thunder barely one month prior to his switching sides — to join a ready-made title contender that had just won 73 games without him constitutes something of a breach of competitive decorum. (Lots of people have used much harsher words to describe it than that.) That fire was stoked by the resurfacing of a six-year-old tweet written by Durant himself, in which he decried an environment in which “everybody wanna play for the Heat and the Lakers” in the aftermath of LeBron James and Chris Bosh heading to Miami to team with Dwyane Wade in the 2010 free agency period.
“Let’s go back to being competitive and going at these peoples!” Durant wrote.
The impulse to “go back” to that kind of approach called to mind the heyday of the NBA’s resurgence in the 1980s, during which the game’s top two stars — Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics — dueled for supremacy and championships. In an interview with Mark Boyle and Chris Spatola on SiriusXM NBA Radio’s “Above The Rim” show, Bird — now the president of the Indiana Pacers — said that while he doesn’t begrudge players like Durant their right to determine where they’d like to ply their trade, he personally never would have made the choice to team up with his primary rival:
“Well, it’s hard, Mark, because when these players get together and go play, it just makes them a lot stronger,” Bird said. “But that’s why we have free agency. If they stay within the rules, I have no problem with it and I’m happy for them. But you’d like to be on a team where you can be competitive. I mean, I know back in the day, I couldn’t imagine going to the Lakers and playing with Magic Johnson. I’d rather try to beat him.
“But you know, these guys are different, and I understand a lot of it, and it’s within the rules, so they can do whatever they do. I can remember years ago, we were fighting, when I played, for free agency, pure free agency, so there could be more movement … but I could never imagine myself going and joining another team with great players, because I had great players, and I was in a great situation.”
That last point, of course, is an important one. During his Celtics career, Bird played with eight players who would go on to become Hall of Famers, starting with Tiny Archibald, Dave Cowens and Pete Maravich during his rookie season, going through his lengthy, successful partnership with Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson, and including brief team-ups with legendary bigs Bill Walton and Artis Gilmore. Magic, for his part, would share the floor at the Fabulous Forum with five Hall of Famers during his career: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, Jamaal Wilkes, Bob McAdoo and James Worthy.
While Durant has certainly suited up alongside talented players in Oklahoma City — most notably long-time All-NBA running buddy Russell Westbrook, but also former Thunder sixth man James Harden and defensive linchpin Serge Ibaka — the depth and breadth of quality partners he’s getting in Golden State looks a lot more like the kind of rosters with which Johnson and Bird found themselves surrounded in L.A. and Boston almost from the moment they were drafted into the league. From a sharp piece published last week by Russ Bengtson of Complex Sports (emphasis mine):
There have been lots of comparisons made historically, that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird would have never teamed up, that Jordan would have never joined a greater team as some kind of a short cut. Let’s start with Magic and Bird, each of whom were—great as they were—born on third base. Magic was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, who already featured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Bird went to the Celtics, the winningest franchise in NBA history. Magic won a title as a rookie. Bird, joined by rookie Kevin McHale and fourth-year center Robert Parish, won a title in his second year. They had no reason to go anywhere.
Had Durant’s Thunder teams been able to get over the hump to grab the brass ring earlier in his career — say, during their trip to the NBA Finals in 2012, where they fell in five games to LeBron, Wade and Bosh, or with a bit more injury luck in the 2013, ’14 and ’15 campaigns, or even after finishing the job with a 3-1 lead against the Dubs this past spring — it’s possible that he wouldn’t have felt compelled to try his luck elsewhere in pursuit of the title that has eluded him. But unlike Bird, Johnson and others who experienced such great success early in their careers, Durant now finds himself nearing 30 and looking for the best possible situation to win a championship. It’s hard to argue against Golden State providing that chance.
“That call to Oklahoma City was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life,” Durant said during his introductory press conference in the Bay Area on Thursday. “Tears were shed. This was like I said a new journey for me, testing the unknown, and I trusted my gut, I trusted my instincts. It’s an unpopular decision, but I can live with it. […] This was the hardest road because I don’t know anybody here. I’ve never lived in this community, never played for this team, and I took a leap.”
Bird’s insistence that he couldn’t have envisioned siding with Magic calls to mind a story from Jackie MacMullan’s great book on Bird and Johnson, “When the Game Was Ours,” about the filming of their iconic 1986 “Choose Your Weapon” Converse commercial. Lakers coach Pat Riley opposed the spot, in part because he didn’t much appreciate Magic fraternizing with the enemy, and in part because he felt confident Bird would never in a million years have agreed to fly out to California, Magic’s turf, to film it, as Johnson had by agreeing to go to Bird’s hometown of French Lick, Ind. Celtics coach K.C. Jones, however, refused to believe would meaningfully change the competitive nature of the superstars’ relationship.
“Are you kidding?” Jones said. “Larry was the most competitive person alive — except for maybe Magic.”
There’s another story from MacMullan’s book that seems relevant, though — this one from the summer of 1992, when Larry and Magic joined the other best players in the world on Team USA to compete in the Summer Olympics, with members of the legendary Dream Team engaging in a heated discussion over which NBA team was the greatest of all time:
The flurry of protests continued, with five of the greatest players in NBA history [Bird, Johnson, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing] sparring over their own place in basketball history. Magic was indignant at the suggestion that the best team could be anyone other than his 1987 Lakers, the team he had determined was the finest of his title years.
“Put me with Kareem, James Worthy, Coop [Michael Cooper] and Byron Scott, and we’ dominate your Bulls team,” Magic claimed.
Barkley was about to chime in again, but Bird, taking a slug of his beer, shot his hand up.
“Quiet,” Bird said. “Charles, you ain’t won anything. You’re out of his discussion. Ahmad [Rashad, who was covering the 1992 Olympics for NBC], same thing. You’re gone. Patrick, you don’t have any championships either, so you need to shut up and sit down right here and learn some things.”
Barkley, subdued by the unfortunate reality of his basketball résumé, wandered off. Ewing, who had once considered Bird a bitter adversary but would develop an unusual kinship with him during their Olympic experience, dutifully sat on the bench next to his new friend.
One wonders which Bird would have a harder time imagining: not taking the opportunity to play with Magic if it presented himself in the full, true free agency for which he and his fellow players had fought … or not giving himself every opportunity possible to take part in the only conversation that really seems to matter among players at the absolute highest levels of the game.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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