On Saturday night, Kevin Durant made a shot or two—a three with eight minutes left in the first quarter seemed like a harbinger of friskiness to come; maybe he’d finally joined the game!—but he mostly jogged from hoop to hoop looking sort of lost.
By now, he’s about as famous—and, therefore, as compulsively and thoroughly photographed—as an athlete can get, but the Erizku photograph, which totally absents his face, gave me a new way to think about Durant. Something in those shoulders and in the set of the neck, in the sign of unashamed age suggested by the unhidden bald spot, gave an impression of the unflappable calm that comes only by way of long-sustained excellence.
The Celtics players covered Kyrie Irving with a steady stream of double- and triple-teams, as they did Durant. On Saturday, the Nets gave out black T-shirts at Barclays, the better to achieve a kind of galvanizing unity in the stands. Kids wore Durant and Irving jerseys, and their parents pulled on the free shirts, but all through the crowd, amid the monochrome, you could see a steady peppering of Celtic green. Some kids behind me—teen-agers, I think, or possibly young adults in their earliest twenties—yelled out generic phrases of encouragement for the home team. They were loud but didn’t sound fierce.
Once the game got going, and Tatum headed to the line, one guy shouted out, “Hey, Jayson, you suck!,” and I was surprised less by the uninspired insult than by the fact that I could hear it so clearly. An older man in the row ahead of me was the most properly fanatic fan that I could see. He was in all black with a white wristband, wearing a huge hood, and stood up throughout the entire first half of the game.
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