KD, Part Deux

I pretty much said my piece on this Kevin Durant business yesterday. But the little rascal just won't hold still, so I've decided to tack on another piece to the piece.

This after hearing Charles Barkley criticizing Durant on the two Mikes this morning, saying KD's trying to cheat his way to a title.

In a word: Bull. Feathers.

(OK, so that's two words).

Bullfeathers, because I seem to recall Chuckles kinda-sorta doing the same thing during his playing days, about which too many old-school types develop an unfortunate case of amnesia when it comes to playing that tired old game, Back In My Day. Well, back in Charles' day, he forced a trade from Philadelphia to Phoenix, which had Tom Chambers and Kevin Johnson and Dan Majerle and was coming off a 53-29 season. With the addition of Charles, the Suns went 62-20 the next year and reached the NBA Finals, where they lost to the Bulls in six games.

To sum up: Barkley left Philly to go to a team that had all the pieces in place (except him) to make a serious run at a title. In other words, he left for a better chance to win a ring.

Yet now he's going to bash KD for doing the same thing?

Weak. Weak, too, is all the other Back In The Day types saying, well, you'd never have seen Jordan or Bird or Magic doing that. Or West or Oscar doing that.

Thing about that is, Jordan and Bird and Magic didn't have to jump ship, because everyone else came to them. And West and Oscar played in an era before free agency, so they didn't have the option. As it turned out, Oscar did kind of pull off a KD-type move, although it wasn't his idea. After nine mostly fruitless seasons in Cincinnati, he was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks -- who just happened to have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bobby Dandridge, and who, with Oscar, won the NBA title the year he arrived.

I've never seen anywhere that Oscar gave the ring back because he just happened to land on an NBA champion. And when Charles left Phoenix?

He went to the Rockets, who still had Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler from a team that had won back-to-back NBA titles a couple of seasons prior.

 But, yeah. Those old-school guys, they never chased any rings.