Does Kevin Durant’s move to the Warriors make the NBA fascinating or predictable?

Kevin Durant is joining the Golden State Warriors, and NBA fans are feeling conflicted about it. Is all this star power on one team good for the NBA? Lifelong hater Zito Madu and eternal optimist Ricky O’Donnell decided to talk it out.

ZITO: To get the obvious out of the way since it seems everyone has fallen in love with binary thinking, what Kevin Durant did as an employee in seeking his best path to success is a good move for him personally. He wants to win rings and the Warriors provide the best opportunity to do so.

But sports are not binary. If basketball was as stale as any other job, it wouldn’t be as profitable or entertaining. The game is built on stories. It’s driven off emotions. Even the NBA’s old advertising slogan of “Where Amazing Happens” is rooted in the most basic human story of overcoming the odds. The actual game of basketball is secondary to the meaning that we impose on it.

In that sense, Durant moving to the Warriors is just boring. It’s lame.

RICKY: I think there’s a fundamental question at play here: are non-organic “superteams” boring and lame, or does Kevin Durant’s decision to join the Warriors transcend the entire concept?

If it’s the former, I’ll ride for superteams. Don’t forget about how this year’s playoffs began. There were a historic number of blowouts, and the majority of the matchups weren’t any more compelling on paper. But what’s everyone going to remember? An amazing Thunder-Warriors series in the Western Conference Finals and an even better series in the NBA Finals, complete with a totally mesmerizing Game 7.

When the best players in the world are going against the best players in the world, it’s great theater. If you’d prefer to increase the chances of seeing the Raptors and Heat embarrass themselves for seven games, be my guest. I’ll roll with the heavyweights.

ZITO: I think both of those can be true. We’ve tried to compare his move to others in history, but this is totally unprecedented for a player of his caliber. A former MVP and slam-dunk best player from the toughest challenger in the West joined a team that just went 73-9 and was a quarter away from a championship. They now have the NBA’s three best shooters, possibly the league’s best defender and two of the three best overall players in the league. It’s the most extreme form of the rich getting richer.

There are superteams, and then there is Kevin Durant on the Warriors.

It’s great theater when great teams play each other, but this move actually nullifies the chances of seeing that happen. The Spurs were no match for the Warriors last year and they arguably got worse this offseason. Every other West team is light years behind. OKC was the only team in that conference that really threatened the Warriors, and aside from the finals, that was the best matchup in the playoffs by far.

But now, Durant’s move has totally erased that potential thriller and vaporized any real competition in the West (and possibly the entire league).

Those boring blowouts from earlier in the playoffs are all that we’re left with now. Golden State vs. OKC is a non-event. Beyond that, we now have 82 games of waiting for the inevitable, with the only conflict being how the Warriors can fit together. That’s a problem akin to a billionaire learning to properly live with all his riches. It’s not just a first-world problem. It’s THE most ridiculous of first-world problems.

RICKY: I agree with everything you said there. Barring injury or a prolongated groin-related suspension, next season is going to be a bloodbath.

But that view is only limited to next season. Do you think the NBA’s other stars are just going to accept that the Warriors have the best team now? Nah. This is only the start. It’s all about happens next, and that begins with LeBron and Russell Westbrook.

From here on out, every decision LeBron makes has to be about beating the Warriors. The time for sentimentality is over. If that means riding up to New York with Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade on a banana boat to join Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis on the 2017-18 Knicks, so be it. Maybe it means convincing CP3 (a 2017 free agent) to leave LA for Cleveland. Maybe it means joining the Timberwolves! Now that Durant is in Golden State, it’s all on the table.

Plus, now we get to see Westbrook make it his life’s mission to beat Kevin Durant in a playoff series. I’m guessing every other superstar is thinking the same thing. When KD is in the chapel saying Hail Marys with Steph Curry, everyone else has to be scheming.

Get Boogie, Paul George and Anthony Davis together! Get Jimmy Butler with Kawhi Leonard and Blake Griffin! It’s going to take a superteam to beat this superteam. All bets are off now. Whatever happens next, the Warriors brought it on themselves.

Zito: That’s true, this could lead to one of the biggest arms races of our time. Hopefully, that leads to great basketball games and a restoration of some type of sanity, even if it’s by everyone else going to the extreme.

Because it would be an incredible bore to watch Curry, Durant, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson light every team up for 160 points a game until the finals. That is, unless you’re Joe Lacob. And I can’t live in a world where that man always gets his way.

Ricky: There’s good reason to be skeptical that the arms race will ever really take off. Who else is going to have the salary-cap flexibility afforded by an MVP caliber player on a contract that pays him half of his market value? What other group of four All-NBA players could even match the Warriors’ combination of shooting, defense and youth?

It’s going be hard, but I want to believe. If Kevin Durant can join the Warriors after shooting 1-of-7 in the fourth quarter of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, anything is possible.

And those possibilities only open up because Durant joined Golden State. The future is far from inevitable.