Tyrese Maxey, Kevin Durant, and the thing we forget when we talk about sports

For a while there, as Kevin Durant spent a couple of weeks demanding that the Brooklyn Nets kowtow to his every whim, no matter how unreasonable or contradictory those whims were, we had ourselves a fascinating debate around here. The debate was born of a wee little news item, or rumor, or throwaway scrap of NBA gamesmanship. One never knows for certain the nature of such things.

Boiled down, the debate came down to this question: If you were Daryl Morey and the 76ers, would you give up Tyrese Maxey in a trade to acquire Durant? Now, Maxey wouldn’t have been the only player or asset the Sixers would have had to surrender for Durant. In fact, the Sixers would have had to include so many players and assets in such a trade that they might have been left with Durant, Joel Embiid, James Harden, two members of the Dunk Squad to round out the starting five, and zero first-round draft picks until 2031 — just in time, presumably, for their new arena’s ribbon-cutting.

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Even though the idea of trading for Durant turned out to be smoke and probably was smoke all along, there was a discussion to be had about how far the Sixers ought to go, given the makeup of their roster, to try to win a championship right now. But the debate, from talk-radio studios to Twitter, from barrooms to blogs, wasn’t really about that. It was about Durant or Maxey. Which, on the surface, would seem as one-sided as a debate gets. One is an excellent, still-improving player who is just 21 years old. The other is, at a minimum, one of the 25 best players in NBA history and, at 33, still has plenty of years ahead before retirement. If you have your choice of players, generally speaking, you choose the all-time great.

Except it was clear that, for the Sixers-rooting public, the call wasn’t so close. Many, if not most, of the team’s fans believed that, if the deal required Maxey’s inclusion, then it wasn’t worth making. There was something going on beyond the cold calculation of whether the Sixers, purely from a basketball standpoint, were better off pulling the trigger on such a trade or not.

That dynamic, that loyalty to a lesser player, speaks to an element that often gets overlooked when we talk about sports: the connection that fans feel between themselves and certain athletes. It has taken Maxey just two years, since the Sixers drafted him in 2020, to forge that kind of bond. In Philadelphia, there’s a fine line between appreciating the fan base and pandering to it. Nick Sirianni and Bryce Harper sometimes cross it. Maxey doesn’t, or at least he hasn’t yet, and the Sixers know it. He has spent this week on a media tour. He joined NBC Philadelphia’s telecast of Tuesday’s Phillies-Reds game, and he appeared in Chester for the Union’s match against the Colorado Rapids on Saturday night.

“The fan base is amazing,” Maxey said Tuesday as he sat in the bleachers of Citizens Bank Park. “It’s second to none. The hardworking people, they’re always at the Wells Fargo Center, and they work hard to get there. It makes me feel comfortable, and it feels like it’s home.”

Fans eat this stuff up, and it’s hard to blame them. Did Phillies devotees fill the park every summer night from 2007 to 2011 because those clubs won five consecutive National League East titles and a World Series? Will Eagles fans always cherish that 2017-18 Super Bowl run? Of course. But those teams’ most beloved members — Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, Jason Kelce, Nick Foles, Brandon Graham — all came up as pups here. A city, especially this one, will celebrate any championship, but those two were made sweeter for the long and deep emotional investment that people had made in so many of the key figures.

Those opportunities — to follow an appealing and talented athlete as he or she spends years in one place — are rarer these days. Consider this choice: You can watch Allen Iverson or Maxey every night for 10 years, knowing your favorite team will never win a championship. Or you can watch the Sixers win one championship, knowing your favorite team will spend the next nine years playing nothing but boring, irrelevant basketball. The average Sixers fan’s answer might surprise you.

The realities of free agency, player empowerment and entitlement, and fantasy sports have reconciled a lot of fans and media to seeing pro stars as nothing more than mercenaries, and many of them are. Durant is, though he seems a tortured, reluctant one. What he is, without any doubt, is the latest model of the modern major millennial pro athlete. He has ricocheted from Oklahoma City to Golden State to Brooklyn, each relocation of his own accord, never fully happy at any of those stops. Most recently, he demanded that the Nets either trade him or fire Sean Marks and Steve Nash — the general manager and coach whom Durant himself had pretty much hand-picked. But Joe Tsai, the Nets’ owner, called that bluff, and Durant had to slink back to the Barclays Center, with Ben Simmons as his prospective starting center.

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The NBA and the media who immerse themselves in covering it don’t mind Durant being a low-grade Hamlet. It’s good for clicks and social-media scuttlebutt, and the league long ago decided that it would market stars and gossip first and teams and rivalries second. But if Maxey was sincere in what he said, and there’s no reason to think he wasn’t, he could enjoy an advantage throughout his career that Durant never has and probably never will. Maxey has a home. Durant doesn’t. And in sports, a home still matters, to those who play and to those who bear witness to the games, hoping and wishing for something that lasts.