Friday, June 14, 2019

Turn the page. Maybe.

So this is how it ends, maybe, with a man sitting on a gleaming hardwood floor clutching his knee and grimacing. That was Klay Thompson sitting down there in the third quarter last night, but in a different time it was Magic Johnson and Byron Scott limping around on pulled hammys, or Larry Bird lying on his belly on the sideline, trying to coax some stretch into his failing back.

Even the gods are prone to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, as the Bard once sort of wrote. Dynasties do not end with a bang but with a whimper, or sometimes with a grimace. And maybe that's what we saw on the night the Toronto Raptors turned We The North into We The Everywhere.

Hard not to see the Golden State Warriors lose Kevin Durant to an Achilles tear and then lose Klay to an ACL tear and not see 1989. when the Bad Boys in Detroit and injuries to Magic and Scott brought down the curtain on the Showtime Lakers. Guys get old or they get hurt or a Kawhi Leonard comes along who's impervious to their will, and that is that.

Or, not.

The Warriors, after all, still have Steph and still have Draymond and will still have Klay, eventually, though perhaps never the Klay that was. They will still be someone you have to beat to get where you want to go. But KD is probably gone, and if the Warriors' core is still young, it's never going to be as young as it is not. And everyone around them is going to load up this summer in a fat free agent market that includes, yes, Kawhi Leonard.

So maybe next year is the year they don't get to the NBA Finals for the first time in six years. Maybe.

Nothing lasts forever, after all. Not in sports or lawn equipment or modes of transportation or, thankfully, political regimes. And so (as the Blob noted the other day) if this isn't the end of the Warriors run, we can at least see it from here.

Maybe it's not yet the turning of a page. But we're down to the last paragraph on it, and you can begin to hear the rustle.

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