Durant signs extension with evil

Remember when KD dropped 42 on the Warriors his last game as a Sonic? Ugh...

Over two years gone now, I still had one more hope, one more source of possible happiness from my one time Seattle SuperSonics.  More over it was a hope for their star player, Kevin Durant, who spent all of one year in the pacific northwest.  Opt out.  That’s all I ever wanted from him.  You see, I loved KD in as a college player, my favorite non-Husky hooper at the time, and even with the Sonics departure imminent, I still remember how excited my friends and I were when Seattle landed the number two pick in the lottery and I knew that it meant Durant was going to be a Sonic.  I always liked him more as a player than Oden, who I knew Portland would have to take with the first pick.  Yes, I know that’s easy to say now, but it really is true.  Oden didn’t seem to have much offensive game in my opinion, was often hurt, and looked like an older version of Robert Parrish, which couldn’t be good.  He was still a great prospect, but why take the next Dikembe Mutombo, when you could have the next Elgin Baylor and George Gervin rolled into one?

He was raw his rookie year, but you saw the talent and knew it was only a matter of time.  It became harder to watch as the season went one and the certainty that my childhood team was indeed going to leave my beautiful hometown in the 12th biggest media market in the country, where they won an NBA championship, to go to some podunk town in the middle of nowhere, led by an owner who was about the equivalent of the anti-christ (On a tangent note, although I hate Clay Bennett and believe he’s one of they biggest a-holes ever, I don’t really blame him.  I would have done the same thing in his shoes, as would 99% of Sonic fans.  In fact we probably will do it to New Orleans or Memphis or some other team in the next few years.  David Stern and Howard Schultz are really to blame and are both equally big a-holes in their own right.  Schultz in particular, is one of the most worthless d-bags I’ve ever met in my entire life.).  One tiny consolation was out there for me though.  I thought and hoped that when his rookie contract was up, and Durant had achieved superstar status, he would opt out of his contact, become a free agent and get as far away from Oklahoma as he could.  He would go to New York or LA or whatever, and the Thunder would be left a talentless shell of a team.  They would start to lose games, fans would stop coming, and the NBA would realize that Oklahoma City can’t support an NBA franchise, and the team would be forced to eventually move.  Not back to Seattle, I’m not that delusional and would hope we had a new team by then, but somewhere, anywhere else.  I would be able to say “I told you so”, and Clay Bennett, Aubrey McClenden, and everyone in OKC (who I really don’t know and should have anything against, but I can’t help it) would know how we felt up in Seattle when they ripped our team away.  It came halfway true this year, as Durant led the league in scoring and was second in the MVP voting.  All that was left was for him to become a free agent after next season.  That won’t happen though.  Durant apparently has agreed an $86 million extension to stay by Clay Bennett’s side for the next five years (ESPN article: http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5360721).  To make matters worse, GM Sam Presti has done a fantastic job putting the team together and they look like they will be contenders for quite a while.  Teamed with Russell Westbrook, who was a Sonic for about 10 minutes, Durant looks like he’ll be able to grab multiple titles in his career, which looks like it will be going anywhere, geographically speaking.  Meanwhile, we’ll just sit up in NBA no mans land and wait for Husky basketball to start.  Who needs the NBA anyway. (Seriously, did you see game 7?  That was awful basketball.)

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