Warriors reportedly divided on whether to pursue Durant in free agency
Kevin Durant will be an unrestricted free agent this summer, and most teams would jump at the chance to add one of the league's top five players to their roster.
Most teams, however, are not the Golden State Warriors.
This Warriors team is historically great by more than one measurement, so tinkering with it in any meaningful way deserves a significant amount of deliberation before any decisions are made. And internally (via ESPN's Zach Lowe), the team is divided over whether or not to pursue Durant for this very important reason.
Most of the two-dozen or so team executives I polled over the past two weeks on the Durant-Warriors possibility described it as a no-brainer ("Bench smench," texted one GM), but there is some division within the Warriors, and you can understand why. They might have the best basketball team ever assembled! How can you shake that up? They are obliterating victims by about 13 points per 100 possessions. Unless the league adds a 4-point shot or lengthens the game, it is almost literally impossible to get any better. And the Warriors have already been proven right choosing continuity over a sweet-shooting shiny object in Kevin Love.
The primary concern for the Warriors is that they have found the perfect mix of players who complement one another in a very specific system. Durant is an all-world talent, but he may be redundant on a team with a scorer like Stephen Curry already in place.
There are other issues too, like wondering just how long the current group can keep it going before age, injuries and salary cap considerations eventually catch up. But the fact that the Warriors are the one team in the league that might say "nah" if Durant is interested only shows how successful they've become, and further demonstrates that fantasy basketball just doesn't work in real-life NBA scenarios.
