Go Ahead And Get Upset About Kevin Durant's Injury

After a rapid and opaque rehabilitation from a strained calf, Kevin Durant’s return to Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday was cut short by a devastating injury. Everyone on the Warriors seems both stricken and kind of confused about who to blame; journalists like The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami who wrote critically about Durant’s injury wasted no time in blaming themselves. Given that everyone was getting upset about the whole thing, Drew and I decided that we weren’t going to be left behind. We love shouting!

If you are reading or listening to this on Deadspin you not only know about all this already, but have likely also been rendered queasy after a few spins through the Internet Recrimination Cycle. While on that ride you may have learned that this whole dumb thing—the whispering and the ill-fated comeback and the injury that seems likely to cost everyone a year of Durant’s cornball brilliance—should be blamed on the Warriors’ training staff, or coaches, or on the media covering the team, or on you yourself you ungrateful louse. It’s clear that both Kevin Durant’s competitiveness and the cruel vagaries of an unfair universe are factors at play, too. We didn’t come to much of a conclusion on the question, although in the face of something this bad and bad-feeling it’s easy to understand why people would search for someone or something to blame. It would be nice to have something specific to be angry at, but sometimes things just suck!

Because these very strange and very good NBA Finals are not yet over, and because they’re bigger than one superstar’s injury. Drew and I talked a decent amount of basketball before and after hopping on the Achilles Express, because there is a lot of good basketball to talk about—the Raptors looking bulletproof and Kawhi Leonard briefly looking like fucking Michael Jordan, and then both abruptly turning into pumpkins; the Warriors looking like the Warriors, but also maybe doing so for the last time; the future implications attached to all these wild goings-on here in the present. We’re almost out of basketball but also this is a lot of basketball!

The perfect chaser for all that basketball talk was a chilled shot of fragrant Funbag essence. We drank deep and descended, assessing the peculiar concept of The Trendy Vegetable, which led into a surprisingly spirited conversation about veggie burgers between two dudes who happily eat meat burgers, which in turn elicited an absolutely hellacious name-drop from Drew. The Trump Question Of The Week concerns our Wet King’s past engagement with the electoral process, and we both made so many good points that we didn’t really come close to answering it. The episode concludes with a reader email so harrowing that there was no choice but to end the podcast immediately afterwards. In that instance, if in that instance only, it was clear who was at fault. It’s the father-in-law with all the erotic fiction tabs open on his iPad. Duh.

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