It was the most ambitious NBA/MCU crossover event in recent memory: The Warriors, like Thanos, were inevitable. Sure, their regular-season performance had been underwhelming. And based on last year’s playoffs, the Rockets seemed to have a shot at taking out the defending champs. But it was hard to truly believe that Golden State wouldn’t end up with their third straight title. It wasn’t just that they cast a Thanos-like pall of doom and gloom over the sport. Like Thanos, the Warriors also didn’t ever seem to relish laying waste to the competition. What made the Warriors such a bummer was the same thing that made Thanos horrifying: that someone could destroy the entire universe and just be going through the motions.
Of course, the Avengers ended up defeating Thanos, which was supposed to be great and inspiring because they triumphed in the fact of what certainly seemed like inevitability, so the meme never really worked to begin with. But while it took the entire MCU firing on all cylinders to take down Thanos, the Warriors lost their apocalyptic mojo when Kevin Durant went down with a calf injury in the second round. Durant will presumably be just fine—thankfully, it wasn’t the torn Achilles that many initially feared it to be—but he has yet to suit up again and his return keeps getting pushed further and further out. While Durant will presumably return at some point in the playoffs, at this point neither he nor the Warriors seem to be in any rush, which is the single strongest argument for their being the most formidable NBA team ever assembled.
Without Durant, though, the Warriors are a different team. It’s not clear they’re that much worse, which speaks to both how improbably top-heavy their roster is and how imperfect Durant’s integration into the Golden State system has been at times. They finished off the Rockets, who were expected to be their toughest match-up, without K.D. and, barring any major surprises, will complete the sweep against the plucky Trail Blazers tonight and roll into the Finals just as everyone had expected all along. But the Warriors no longer seem inevitable or invincible. Maybe it’s because this Durant-less formation blew a 3-1 lead; maybe it’s just because losing Kevin Durant should make a team objectively less scary. Either way, the Warriors suddenly have to play their way to a title just like every other team, rather than hedging against the assumption that that many Hall of Famers could only ever accomplish so little.
The Rockets catch hell for their frequently bureaucratic style of play, which is concerned more with exploiting loopholes and working angles than the pursuit of athletic excellence. The logic of the Warriors with Durant, though, is no less cynical or detached. For all the talk of how this team’s principal stars are always willing to put team ahead of their individual egos—whether it’s Durant offering up his services at a discount, Stephen Curry often deferring to Durant on offense, or Draymond Green disappearing as a scorer—the Warriors have a formula that in no way depends on chemistry or collective inspiration. It’s barely even a team concept. A core of Durant, Curry, Green, and Klay Thompson is bound to play well at least some of the time. Put enough Hall of Famers on the floor together and give them enough opportunities, and over a seven-game series, enough will happen to guarantee them victory. The Warriors will always win in the long term, because it’s almost mathematically impossible for them to lose.
It’s not that the Warriors are suddenly vulnerable without Durant. They’re just no longer able to default to a title based on the atomized contributions of high-test individuals. “The Warriors are more fun without Durant” has become a truism, and certainly they simply have to be more resourceful and creative when they can’t count on K.D. to score on anyone, at any time, from anywhere.
But they’re also being forced to generate something, to have ideas, to have a plan and execute against it. And it’s not just that a team heavily reliant on Curry’s jaw-dropping threes and Green’s preternatural feel for the game is more exciting than one that can always fall back on Durant’s scoring. The Warriors are having to work together as a unit, rather than as a disjointed, seemingly mercenary collection of stars each doing exactly what is expected of them, nothing more and nothing less. They’re as good as they are not because it has to be that way, but because they’re undeniably asserting themselves—and earning their reputation—on every possession.
Because Avengers: Endgame is a very stupid movie made for the express purpose of pandering to a fairly low common denominator, reading too much into Thanos’s signature line may seem like a waste of time. But art is often smarter and deeper than the people who made it, sometimes even in spite of them, and there’s an interpretation of “I am inevitable” that doesn’t seem blatantly contradicted by the good guys saving the day. What if Thanos wasn’t contemplating his own awesomeness but instead commenting on the role he was playing in the overall destiny of the universe? Thanos himself may not have been inevitable, but one way or another, what he was trying to accomplish was bound to happen. It’s a way of thinking about history that presumes that there is a logic or order to things, even if it’s not always readily apparent in the moment. You can’t predict the future, but you can always make sense of the past in hindsight.
As far as dismal things about Thanos goes, it doesn’t top killing off half of all the life in the universe. But it gets to the heart of what’s made the Warriors such a bummer for the past three seasons: That this was bound to happen sooner or later, that the entire sport would eventually be reduced to the bloodless consolidation of talent. What the Warriors are doing now is the antidote to this way of thinking about basketball. And while it may end as soon as Durant returns, it’s good to know that the same team that ruined the NBA still has it within their powers to revive the best possible version of the sport if Durant ends up gone for good.
