It was a day that would change the structure of the NBA's foundation and future. The day was July 8, 2010. Words that will live infamously throughout NBA lore. "I'm taking my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat." Lebron James shook up the NBA landscape. He, along with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, trumped the efforts of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen's three-headed monster idea with a younger and far more athletic version. We thought that Lebron James going to Miami was the craziest thing we'd ever see in free agency. We were wrong.
Kevin Durant going down with an apparent achilles injury during Game 5 of the NBA Finals may have set the NBA down a path that was seemingly already paved. Kevin Durant may now stay in Golden State. After losing in the Western Conference Finals with the Oklahoma City Thunder and joining the Golden State Warriors the summer after the season ended, Kevin Durant put the NBA on notice. The Warriors just added arguably the best player in the NBA to a regular season record-breaking team.
What happend in Game 5 of the NBA Finals may be more important than both Lebron going to Miami and Durant leaving OKC for Golden State. The Warriors may have, through a stroke of bad luck, given themselves a tributary to signing Durant again. Stealing him away from free agency seemed daunting at first. But now, Durant will be 32 before the start of the 2020-21 season where he'll be fully healthy again. He will be coming off an achilles injury that few have come back from, let alone at full strength. The Golden State Warriors, by losing their star now, may have sewn up their star for the rest of his career. In a landscape-altering way, Kevin Durant's torn achilles may pave the way for the greatest sustained conglomerate of talent the NBA has seen since the 60s Celtics.