For now, the concern has to be for the player, even here, even in Manhattan, where so much hope — real, imaginary, virtual — has been tied up in the vision of Kevin Durant wearing an orange “35” against a classic white Knicks uniform opening night next year. Or across the East River, where lately a renewed hope casting him in a black “Brooklyn” jersey has arisen, too.
We are not savages, after all, certainly not of the category of the guttersnipes in the Toronto crowd who Monday cheered when Durant crumpled to the floor, something clearly amiss. Later, we would learn that it was as was feared: an Achilles injury, severity unknown until he slips into an MRI tube Tuesday.
So yes: The first positive vibes must go to Durant, who could’ve skipped the rest of the Finals with a nine-figure summer awaiting and his team with one foot on the golf course already.
Of course, the fact that he chose to play — and seemed reasonably close to his superlative self across his 11 minutes of action — only underlines why he will be so coveted come July 1. In a time when LeBron James seems on the other side of the mountain, it is either Durant or Kawhi Leonard who fills that void now. And Leonard, for all his greatness, has had an injury cloud following him.
And now, so does Durant.
And that is why the Knicks and the Nets can now wonder if their own futures — which they’ve each crafted in meticulous, if divergent, ways — weren’t given a sharp jolt Tuesday night, when Durant went down, when he grabbed for his Achilles, when an entire sport held its breath.
An Achilles injury is just about the worst thing a basketball player can suffer. We can see instant evidence of that watching Durant’s teammate DeMarcus Cousins scuffle with inconsistency (though, ironically, Cousins was brilliant Monday, and great as the Splash Brothers might’ve been down the stretch of the Warriors’ season-saving 106-105 win, they wouldn’t have had a prayer without Cousins’ 13 points and six rebounds). Achilles injuries hastened the demise of Kobe Bryant and Chauncey Billups (though both were a few years older than KD). Hardly any player has ever matched his pre-Achilles self when it happens.
The outlier is Dominique Wilkins, who hurt his Achilles at 32 but came back to average 28 points over the next two seasons and generally resumed his above-the-rim game.
That, of course, is a conversation for sometime in the distant future. For now there are shattered teammates and an emotional Bob Myers, the Golden State president, who was in tears as he revealed the devastating news less than an hour after his team bought itself a few extra days of basketball season.
“Kevin Durant loves to play basketball,” he said, “and the people that questioned whether he wanted to get back to this team were wrong. He’s one of the most misunderstood people. He’s a good teammate, he’s a good person. It’s not fair.”
Not to Durant. Not to the Warriors. Not to the NBA. And no: not to the teams who’ve been hoping to woo him East and try to set themselves up to be led by his guiding hand to a better basketball place than either has lately known. The Knicks and Nets were primed to initiate borough warfare to bring the game’s signature player East.
Those plans might have also taken a hit with 9:46 left in the second quarter, on the floor of Scotiabank Arena.