The Side Part: Plates filled with crow

On Sunday I was back in Oklahoma visiting family, three pews from the back, white walls, balcony wrapping around, carpet the color of cartoon seaweed, and a man named Billy in a Polo polo was up on stage and wearing a Garth mic, talking about how it’s good to shut our screens off from time to time.

It’s important to check in with the people you love, he said. Ask them how their day was, how school went, what they’re looking forward to. This is a paraphrase.

And he was talking and I felt my left leg get nudged and I looked and it was my sister and she held her left thumb out and to the left and she goes with her mouth, “Dad.” And I look at my Dad and his face looks very…worried (there’s a better word for it but I can’t find it)…and he’s holding his phone out and toward me and he mouths the word, “look.” And I take the phone and press the home button to light up the screen and look at it and it’s a notification from Bleacher Report’s Team Stream And Other Dream Things Like Memes and Natron Means or whatever it’s called and it says “Oklahoma City Thunder Small Forward Kevin Durant out 6-8 weeks with Jones Fracture Your Life Is Now Harder And The Sun Will Not Shine Tomorrow.”

Then my pocket starts moving and I pull out my phone and it’s a text from my friend Drew and Drew writes — and this is poetic — “KD nooooo,” which is probably what this column should have been. Just those eight letters and some Getty Image of Durant with his head down, something from some Memphis game from years past, strained face, frustration, Tony Allen somewhere near by, laughing, asking how to get to the nearest Long John Silver’s, Hollinger next to him like “yea that place is delicious let’s go it’s this way.”

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I truly have no idea what the Thunder will do to combat the loss of Durant, namely because every answer begins with “Well they might go with blank” and ends with a child looking out a wintery window — thin tears taking their time down the cheeks, flakes falling outside — at a pair of headlights that aren’t coming back for a very long time.

The very short answer is that the team will be much worse, but we can lengthen it to say that in no way will they be bad. This team is capable of floating, and even swimming, in the short term, with Durant out. The schedule is a bear cub but not a full on Mom Grizzly in those first eight weeks and this is a chance, as you’ve probably read over 100 times by now, for other players to step up. That is true. Tired, yes, very, but true.

*****

One of my favorite observations Royce has ever made happened on Sunday evening. The quote’s below:

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It says maybe everything you need to know about Russell Westbrook that the Thunder may actually be more interesting right now without the league’s MVP.

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I like that quote very much. There has never been anything predictable about Russell Westbrook. Not since any of us have know him, at least. To make predictions about his play almost feels like we’re playing into his hands, victims of some grand prank that will happen somewhere in the future where afterwards we’re all just eating plate-fulls of crow for hours on end while he forces us to watch him try on different pairs of sunglasses and sleeveless purple t-shirts with hoods on them — all because we underestimated him. All because we weren’t sure he could handle leading a team.

Russ will be Russ. He will be maddening and he will be infuriating and he will be amazing and he will be an enigma and he will be very good. I second guessed him along with most everyone else during the playoffs last year and he made me and the rest of the world look stupid while he thoroughly outplayed the guy everyone considered to be the best point guard in the league.

Few guys can make the entire game bend. Even fewer can the game bend till it snaps. The Thunder had two players that could do that. At least they still have one.

Tyler Parker is a contributor to Daily Thunder and Ballerball. Follow him on Twitter here.