The Warriors are an embodiment of the NBA’s twisted ring culture

There were two commercials during and after the last game of the NBA Finals that captured the culture of the league. First up was Dr. J giving a soliloquy: “The Finals. We’re talking about the ultimate stage. You will see men of remarkable presence. They will test your belief and put time and gravity on hold. But all that elegance. All that style. None of it really matters if you don’t win, because when it’s over: you either have a ring or you don’t.”

The other was a Nike ad that dropped right after the Warriors won and Kevin Durant was named Finals MVP. It’s titled “Debate This” and features a roundtable of critics disparaging Durant as clips from his career play on several screens. It ends with criticism of his move to Golden State, and then silence when it’s announced that Durant is an NBA champion.

The Nike ad misreads the criticisms about Durant’s move in a way that positions a Finals win as justification for it. Really, the anger was over the fact that he went to the best team in the league and skewed things so far in its favor that Golden State almost swept the defending champions. That Durant would win a ring was expected before the first game of the season, which is part of the disdain for the move. The debates won’t stop because he fulfilled that goal.

Both ads exemplify a problem that fans now face. If people are angry that Durant went to the best team and won a ring in relatively easy fashion, then they only have themselves to blame. These Warriors are the embodiment of rings culture. The ultimate goal of every team is to win a title, and adding Durant to a historically great team makes that process as straightforward as possible.

Players have been told that the only thing that signifies greatness is a ring. It’s the Michael Jordan burden, that to be considered among the greatest, it’s not enough to be great without the championships to match. Kobe Bryant spent his whole career fiendishly chasing those six rings. When Jordan was asked to choose between Kobe or LeBron James in 2013, he said:

“If you had to pick between the two, that would be a tough choice, but five beats one every time I look at it, and not that he [LeBron James] won’t get five, he may get more than that, but five is bigger than one.”

Players like Allen Iverson, Charles Barkley, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony (Anthony even did a commercial with Foot Locker last year — Week of Greatness — about the ridiculousness of dismissing greatness on the basis of a ring), Tracy McGrady, and Karl Malone are routinely reminded and denigrated for not winning a ring. And when Golden State broke the regular season record, going 73-9 in 2016, before losing in the Finals, an article in the Chicago Tribune ran with the headline, “Warriors prove regular-season wins don’t mean a thing without the ring.”

Many people saw a Warriors team with the most regular season wins ever — a team that had been built through the draft and free agency, as purists demanded — who were one game and a series of catastrophic events away from a title, and decreed that their feats meant nothing. They saw Durant, a player like no other, who had become one of the most efficient scorers ever — a former MVP — and reminded him that all of that didn’t matter. An asterisk would be laid on his career if he didn’t win a ring, same as LeBron before he left for Miami.

You either have a ring or you don’t, after all.

When Durant’s free agency hit at the same time that the Warriors had enough space to sign him, they did the most logical thing in this NBA culture: They came together to satisfy their personal ambitions and the hard line for greatness. When a title is everything, and Durant is available, it would be incredibly stupid not to sign him, or for him to sign with the team that gives him the easiest path to victory.

In the second episode of an old cartoon called Xiaolin Showdown, the four teenage Xiaolin monks are tasked with completing an obstacle course in order to retrieve a small stuffed dog at the end. Their runs are timed. The first three complete it quickly, but the fourth, Clay, is mocked by his friends before he even starts. The students have individual elements, and Clay’s is Earth. Thus, he’s slow and his friends painfully remind him of that.

Before he started his run, Clay asked: “So all I got to do is be the fastest to get to that doggy?” When they assured him that it was the goal, he took a deep breath and after being prompted to go, turned around and grabbed the dog without going through the course.

When the students tell their master that Clay cheated, the master besmirches them and says that you have to find simple answers to complex problems. He lauds Clay for doing so.

Durant and the Warriors only did what they were asked to do. Both had enough success that their greatness shouldn’t have been in question, but in a culture that demands a title or nothing, they found the quickest way to win one. It took the Warriors almost 40 years to win in 2015, and Durant has been in the league a decade without a Finals victory. They went 16-1 through the playoffs in just their first year of marriage.

This is why LeBron built the team in Miami, why Kobe threatened to leave the Lakers, why McGrady went to the Spurs late in his career, why Paul might go to San Antonio as well, why David West left $12 million on the table, and why so many great teams and players are kept at an arm’s length from NBA greatness: Everything in service of the ring. There’s no validation otherwise. The Warriors took that culture to its most extreme, and there can be no complaints from those who asked for it.