Wake me when NBA playoffs are over. Here's why KD must leave Warriors.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Golden State Warriors are interesting again, and the NBA is better for it. This is what happens when you subtract Kevin Durant from a team that never needed him in the first place.

It almost feels like something lost in the shuffle, but the Warriors went 73-9 the season before Durant arrived in Golden State. And while everyone had a laugh making memes about Golden State blowing a 3-1 NBA Finals lead to Cleveland, the fact remained that the Warriors were one win from the greatest season in league history.

That fateful Game 7 in 2016 was the last time the NBA Playoffs contained legitimate suspense involving the Warriors.

The second Durant took his talents to the Bay Area, the race for the Larry O’Brien Trophy was functionally over. Realists knew that the only question left to answer was one of dominance. How badly would the Warriors outclass the opposition?

Answer: very badly.

In 2017, Golden State went 16-1 in the playoffs on its way to the NBA title, outscoring opposition by 13.5 points per game. The Warriors won 15 consecutive games before a token loss to Cleveland. Golden State closed out the Cavs in the next game, joining the 2001 Lakers and 1983 Sixers as the only teams to go through the playoffs with one loss.

No other team has come as close to playoff perfection as those Warriors. Only four of their wins were by single-digits, and only one came by a single possession. They didn’t just beat the competition, they destroyed it.

The 2018 Warriors delivered more anticlimactic results. Durant & Co. went 16-5 in the playoffs, winning by an average of 10 points per game. The Houston Rockets were up 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals, but the Warriors turned it on and won Games 6 and 7 by a combined 38 points.

Golden State proceeded to wipe the Cavs off the map in a four-game sweep, completing a two-year revenge mission that saw the Warriors humiliate an opponent that boasted the best player on the planet —maybe ever.

Just for comparison’s sake, the 2015 Golden State title team went 16-5 in the playoffs and won by a mere 7.8 points per game. That team was fantastic, but compared to both Durant teams, it was a chump.

There’s nothing left for Golden State to accomplish. The Warriors, up 2-0 against Portland in the Western Conference finals, will complete the three-peat this year, and then what?

If these rumors are true, they’ll just keep on rendering the rest of the league obsolete, forcing NBA fans to try to invest themselves in the subplots, because the main story line’s ending is already known.

Go ahead and give the Warriors the a title every year Durant stays. And good luck keeping the playoffs fresh. Dynasties are usually good for sports. Fans love greatness, and they love to see greatness get beat, or at least seriously tested by an equal. The Shaq-Kobe Lakers had the Blazers and Kings. The '80s Lakers and Celtics had each other. Even Michael Jordan’s Bulls had real battles with the Knicks and Jazz.

Golden State has the Rockets, and the Rockets are frauds.

Why bother investing in Warriors games? The creative artistry of what they do has diminished with Durant on the roster. Their basketball is still pretty, but when the big three was the Splash Brothers, plus Draymond Green, they were appointment viewing. For basketball aesthetes, they were heaven — a shining example that the team game, executed at the highest level, was equal parts unstoppable and sublime.

Durant fits their style, but his game is more algorithmic than artistic. Envision the perfect scoring machine created in a lab, and he’s what you get. He’s the ultimate individual force of nature — a get-out-of-jail free card when the team game isn’t quite firing on all cylinders.

Before Durant’s arrival, the Warriors had just enough flaws to be theoretically fallible, though it took a Herculean effort from LeBron James and Kyrie Irving to turn theory into reality.

Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder was close, too. OKC was up 3-1 on Golden State in 2016 but couldn’t close the show. KD's departure from the Thunder was the all-time example of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

His arrival created a basketball monster that sucks up all the oxygen in the league. It changed the landscape of the sport. It was the perfect match of superstar and super-team.

How much, you ask? When Durant got hurt, Vegas dropped Golden State’s odds to win the championship to the plus side of things for the first time all season. The Warriors went from a -225 when the postseason began to +125 after Durant’s injury.

Durant needs a new challenge. He needs to go east, to the Knicks. He can even have a superstar join him there. They wouldn’t be able to create a juggernaut like these Warriors. The league will be wide open once again, like it was pre-2016.

The NBA needs him in New York, too. The Warriors might be great, but as long as they have Kevin Durant, everyone else is playing for second.

There’s a word for that: boring.