Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All Time
The Brooklyn Nets were built to be an unbeatable superteam of eccentric basketball superstars.
布鲁克林篮网队是一支由古怪的篮球巨星组成的无与伦比的超级球队。
Will they dominate the N.B.A.
他们会统治NBA吗？
playoffs?
季后赛？
Kevin Durant in New York City in May.
凯文·杜兰特五月在纽约。
Credit...
信用...
Awol Erizku for The New York Times
《纽约时报》擅离职守埃里兹库
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .
要聆听《纽约时报》等出版物的更多音频故事，请下载 iPhone 或 Android 版 Audm。
Ok, why not, let’s start with the asteroid.
好吧，为什么不呢，让我们从小行星开始吧。
Thirty-five million years ago, a giant space rock, two miles wide, came screaming out of the sky and crashed into Earth.
三千五百万年前，一块两英里宽的巨大太空岩石尖叫着从天空中冲出，撞向地球。
It struck the eastern edge of the landmass we know today as North America.
它袭击了我们今天所知的北美大陆的东部边缘。
And it unleashed an apocalypse.
它引发了一场灾难。
The asteroid hit with the power of many nuclear bombs.
小行星的撞击威力堪比许多核弹。
It hit so hard that it vaporized itself and cracked the bedrock seven miles down.
它的撞击力如此之大，以致于它自己蒸发了，并使七英里以下的基岩破裂。
It incinerated whole forests, killed all life in the area, sent super-tsunamis ripping out across the Atlantic.
它烧毁了整个森林，杀死了该地区的所有生命，并引发了超级海啸横渡大西洋。
You can still find remnants of the trauma (shocked quartz, fused glass) as far away as Texas and the Caribbean.
远至德克萨斯州和加勒比海地区，您仍然可以找到创伤的残余物（冲击石英、熔融玻璃）。
Where it hit, the rock left a scar: a giant smoldering hole more than 50 miles across.
岩石撞击的地方留下了一道疤痕：一个直径超过 50 英里的巨大闷烧洞。
Eons passed.
亿万年过去了。
The world turned cold.
世界变冷了。
Glaciers started crawling down from the north, with irresistible slowness, inching their way toward the asteroid hole, grinding up the landscape, dragging boulders and carving valleys.
冰川开始从北方以不可抗拒的缓慢爬行，慢慢地向小行星洞移动，碾碎地貌，拖动巨石并雕刻山谷。
Then they stopped.
然后他们停了下来。
They started to melt.
它们开始融化。
The glaciers bled ice water, and little trickles went rolling downhill, braiding themselves into rivers, seeking low places in the landscape.
冰川流淌着冰水，细流顺着山坡流淌，汇成河流，寻找地貌中的低处。
Eventually, inevitably, the water found the asteroid hole.
最终，水不可避免地发现了小行星洞。
The ancient crater sucked down streams like a shower drain.
古老的火山口像淋浴排水管一样吸收溪流。
It flooded and overflowed, expanding its borders, mingling freshwater and seawater, filling up with creatures of all kinds: oysters, fishes, turtles, dolphins, otters, pelicans, newts.
它泛滥成灾，扩大了边界，淡水和海水混合在一起，充满了各种生物：牡蛎、鱼类、海龟、海豚、水獭、鹈鹕、蝾螈。
Little blue crabs scuttled through its grasses.
小蓝蟹在草丛中窜来窜去。
Today we call that waterlogged space-hole the Chesapeake Bay.
今天，我们将这个被水淹没的太空洞称为切萨皮克湾。
It is the largest estuary in the United States, a jackpot of fertility, home now to more than 18 million people — and for 400 years it has been a vortex of American history: Jamestown, revolution, tobacco, the Underground Railroad.
它是美国最大的河口，是生育力的头奖，现在拥有超过 1800 万人口——400 年来，它一直是美国历史的漩涡：詹姆斯敦、革命、烟草、地下铁路。
Frederick Douglass used to watch sails gliding across the Chesapeake Bay and dream of being free.
弗雷德里克·道格拉斯（Frederick Douglass）曾经观看过切萨皮克湾的帆船滑行，梦想着获得自由。
I could tell you about that asteroid hole forever.
我可以永远告诉你那个小行星洞的事。
But the reason I am telling you now is that Kevin Durant , the basketball superstar, grew up next to it — so close that he can tell you how many blue crabs come in a bushel.
但我现在告诉你的原因是，篮球巨星凯文·杜兰特就在它旁边长大——距离如此之近，他可以告诉你一蒲式耳中有多少蓝蟹。
On a recent afternoon, when the Brooklyn Nets had a day off, I told Durant the story of the asteroid and the glaciers and the formation of the Chesapeake Bay.
最近的一个下午，当布鲁克林篮网队休息一天时，我向杜兰特讲述了小行星和冰川以及切萨皮克湾形成的故事。
“That’s incredible,” he said, and then he started thinking out loud about the way things evolve over time, how even the tiniest incremental changes can, day after grinding day, turn trauma into beauty.
“这太不可思议了，”他说，然后他开始大声思考事物随着时间的推移而演变的方式，即使是最微小的增量变化也能在日复一日的磨难后将创伤变成美丽。
“Sick,” he said admiringly.
“有病。”他钦佩地说。
“That’s sick.” And: “That’s a message to me.
“这有病啊。”并且：“这是给我的信息。
You telling me that just took me down a deep hole.”
你告诉我这件事让我陷入了深渊。”
Spend any time with Durant and what you will notice, I swear, is not his height (6 feet 10¾ inches) or his wingspan (7 feet 4¾ inches) but deeper things, spiritual things.
我发誓，花任何时间和杜兰特在一起，你会注意到的不是他的身高（6英尺10 3/4英寸）或他的臂展（7英尺4 3/4英寸），而是更深层次的东西，精神上的东西。
You will notice his large, thoughtful, searching eyes; his matter-of-fact self-consciousness; a certain tender, unhidden sadness.
你会注意到他那双大眼睛、深思熟虑的、探索性的。他实事求是的自我意识；某种温柔的、难以掩饰的悲伤。
Durant is a four-time scoring champion and a two-time finals M.V.P.
杜兰特是四届得分王和两届总决赛最有价值球员。
and an 11-time All-Star and the protagonist of countless N.B.A.
11 次入选全明星，也是无数 NBA 球员的主角。
dramas and mini-scandals and memes — by any measure, one of the defining athletes of our time.
戏剧、迷你丑闻和迷因——无论以何种标准衡量，他都是我们这个时代最具代表性的运动员之一。
His decisions about where to play, and which teammates to play with, have thrust whole franchises up to glory and sent others plummeting down.
他对在哪里打球以及与哪些队友一起打球的决定让整个球队走向辉煌，也让其他球队一落千丈。
This season, once again, Durant sits at the center of the wildest drama in basketball: a radical experiment in Brooklyn, where the once-hapless Nets have transformed themselves into a superteam around K.D.
本赛季，杜兰特再次成为篮球界最疯狂戏剧的中心：布鲁克林的一场激进实验，曾经倒霉的篮网队在杜兰特周围转变为一支超级球队。
and his friends — a knot of talent so dense and strange, thrown together with such sudden force, that it is impossible to say whether it will steamroll the entire league or lose narrowly in the second round or dissolve into chaos and go off the grid and turn up 20 years from now on a submarine in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
和他的朋友们——一群才华横溢、奇特的人，以如此突然的力量聚集在一起，无法确定他们是否会碾压整个联盟，还是在第二轮以微弱优势落败，或者陷入混乱，脱离电网，20年后出现在百慕大三角中部的一艘潜艇上。
The Nets seem designed to raise deep philosophical questions about not only basketball but also life.
篮网队似乎旨在提出不仅关于篮球而且关于生活的深刻哲学问题。
What is a team?
什么是团队？
What does it mean to belong?
归属感是什么意思？
What would happen if we took 17 alternate story lines and folded them up together into an origami swan with three heads and a beard?
如果我们将 17 个交替的故事情节折叠在一起，折成一只长着三个头和一个胡须的折纸天鹅，会发生什么？
Which means they are the perfect team for Kevin Durant.
这意味着他们是凯文杜兰特的完美团队。
He has exactly the sort of transcendental galaxy brain that likes to rise up very high, and then slightly higher, to think about things like deep time and space rocks and the meaning of life.
他正是那种喜欢升得很高，然后再升到更高一点的超验星系大脑，去思考诸如深邃的时空岩石和生命的意义之类的事情。
And the Brooklyn Nets are his galaxy-brain superteam.
布鲁克林篮网队是他的银河大脑超级球队。
At long last, after all these many millions of years, Kevin Durant may have finally found his true basketball home.
终于，经过数百万年，凯文·杜兰特可能终于找到了他真正的篮球家园。
Four years ago, the Brooklyn Nets were the worst team in the N.B.A.
四年前，布鲁克林篮网队是NBA最差的球队。
They lost 76 percent of the time and finished 33 games out of first place and were famous mainly for sparse crowds, blowout losses, bad signings and a long history of weird uniforms and dorky mascots.
他们输掉了 76% 的比赛，并在 33 场比赛中落后第一名，主要以观众稀少、惨败、糟糕的签约以及长期以来怪异的队服和愚蠢的吉祥物而闻名。
Today the Nets are arguably the most talented team in basketball history.
如今，篮网队可以说是篮球历史上最有才华的球队。
What happened?
发生了什么？
And how on our spherical Earth did it happen so quickly?
在我们的球形地球上，这一切是如何发生得如此之快的？
Well, let us discuss the phenomenon of superteams.
好吧，让我们讨论一下超级球队的现象。
They are not exactly new.
它们并不完全是新的。
Most of the N.B.A.’s signature historical teams were absolutely stuffed with Hall of Fame talent.
大多数 NBA 标志性的历史球队都绝对充满了名人堂人才。
In the 1980s, Larry Bird and His Outrageously Tall Buddies (three titles, seven Hall of Famers) squared off repeatedly against Magic Johnson and His Bouncy Pals (five titles, six Hall of Famers).
20 世纪 80 年代，拉里·伯德和他的高大伙伴（3 个冠军，7 个名人堂成员）多次与“魔术师”约翰逊和他的“弹力伙伴”（5 个冠军，6 个名人堂成员）对决。
The 1990s were ruled (six titles) by Michael Jordan and His Flying Long-Armed Army (five Hall of Famers).
20 世纪 90 年代由迈克尔乔丹和他的飞行长臂军团（五位名人堂成员）统治（六个冠军）。
But superteams, back then, were basically institutions.
但当时的超级球队基本上都是机构。
They were built slowly, through draft picks and opportunistic trades, and they accrued championships like tree rings.
他们是通过选秀和机会主义交易慢慢建立起来的，他们像年轮一样积累了冠军。
One superstar, in each case, tended to rise above the group, stamping his face on the franchise and collecting corporate endorsements.
在每种情况下，都有一位超级巨星往往会超越群体，在特许经营权上留下自己的印记，并获得公司的认可。
But the real deep power, the power to construct and deconstruct, belonged to the executives: schlubby men in suits who sat in back offices under fluorescent lights writing checks and making extremely boring phone calls.
但真正的深层权力，即构建和解构的权力，属于高管们：穿着西装的邋遢男人，坐在荧光灯下的后台办公室里写支票，打极其无聊的电话。
The modern superteam is something else.
现代超级球队则是另一回事。
It sprang all at once, fully formed, from the brilliant balding head of LeBron James .
它一下子从勒布朗·詹姆斯光鲜亮丽的秃头上冒出来，完全成形。
In 2010, James was the best player in the world, in the full ripeness of his prime, and he was a free agent.
2010年，詹姆斯是世界上最好的球员，正值巅峰时期，而且他还是一名自由球员。
Every executive in American sports would have sacrificed everything to sign him.
美国体育界的每一位高管都会牺牲一切来签下他。
Instead of playing by their rules, however, James flexed his power.
然而，詹姆斯并没有遵守他们的规则，而是展示了他的权力。
He turned the whole thing into a spectacle, starring in a prime-time TV special called “The Decision,” on which he announced, while wearing a magenta gingham shirt, that he would be leaving his home team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, to go off and form a superteam with two other stars in Miami.
他把整件事变成了一场奇观，主演了一部名为“The Decision”的黄金时段电视特别节目，在节目中，他身穿洋红色格子衬衫宣布，他将离开自己的母队克利夫兰骑士队，前往迈阿密与另外两名球星组建一支超级球队。
“Gonna take my talents to South Beach,” is how James unfortunately, infamously, put it.
“要把我的才华带到南海滩，”不幸的是，詹姆斯说了一句臭名昭著的话。
James’s “Decision” decision (as well as his decision to air it as “The Decision”) kicked off a new era.
詹姆斯的“决定”决定（以及他将其作为“决定”播出的决定）开启了一个新时代。
The league’s center of power swung from executives in front offices to group texts among superstars.
联盟的权力中心从前台高管转向超级巨星之间的群发短信。
“The Player Empowerment Era,” people call it.
人们称之为“球员赋权时代”。
Other superstars now routinely do the things James did: They tailor their contracts for maximum flexibility, influence the hiring and firing of coaches and — above all — scheme to play together.
其他超级巨星现在经常做詹姆斯所做的事情：他们调整合同以获得最大的灵活性，影响教练的聘用和解雇，最重要的是，计划一起打球。
This inspired exactly the kind of panic you might expect in certain quarters of America, given the racial dynamics involved: a redistribution of power from (mostly) old white executives to (mostly) young black players.
考虑到所涉及的种族动态，这恰恰引发了美国某些地区可能出现的恐慌：权力从（大部分）老白人高管到（大部分）年轻黑人球员的重新分配。
Many fans suddenly cast LeBron James as a villain.
许多球迷突然将勒布朗·詹姆斯视为反派。
Back in 2010, at the beginning of that new era, Kevin Durant was still a baby-faced prodigy.
时间回到2010年，新时代伊始，凯文·杜兰特还是一个娃娃脸神童。
He was famous for his long arms and his skinny frame and his blandly nice persona — people saw him, basically, as a seven-foot-tall Pez dispenser with a cartoon smiley face.
他以修长的手臂、瘦弱的身躯和温和友善的形象而闻名——人们基本上把他视为一个七英尺高、长着卡通笑脸的 Pez 分配器。
He was also seen as an antidote to the superteam trend.
他也被视为超级球队趋势的解药。
In interviews, Durant said that he hoped to stay forever with his original franchise, the Oklahoma City Thunder (nee the Seattle SuperSonics), and those statements set off trumpet blasts of praise, and everyone lauded him as a sort of anti-LeBron.
在采访中，杜兰特表示，他希望永远留在他原来的球队俄克拉荷马城雷霆队（以前的西雅图超音速队），这些言论引起了人们的热烈赞扬，每个人都称赞他是某种反勒布朗的人。
On the day before James sat down for “The Decision,” Durant announced that he would be signing a five-year contract extension to remain in OKC.
在詹姆斯坐下来接受“决定”的前一天，杜兰特宣布他将签署一份为期五年的续约合同以留在雷霆队。
In 2012, when OKC and Miami met in the finals, all the moral force was on Durant’s side.
2012年，当雷霆队和迈阿密队在总决赛相遇时，所有的道德力量都站在了杜兰特一边。
But James’s superteam won, because that is what superteams do.
但詹姆斯的超级球队赢了，因为这就是超级球队所做的。
Years passed.
几年过去了。
It turned out that much of what people had been reading into Durant — simple, deferential, loyal at all costs — was actually more about them than him.
事实证明，人们对杜兰特的解读——简单、恭敬、不惜一切代价忠诚——实际上更多的是关于他们而不是他。
When Durant’s noble contract extension expired in 2016, he was no longer married to the idea of staying with his team.
当杜兰特的高贵续约合同于 2016 年到期时，他不再愿意留在球队。
He conducted his free agency like the superstar that he was: He rented a mansion in the Hamptons, where he hosted waves of N.B.A.
他在自由球员市场上表现得像个超级巨星：他在汉普顿租了一栋豪宅，在那里举办了几波 N.B.A. 比赛。
suitors.
追求者。
The Thunder had to fly out there like everyone else, and in the end, Durant made a choice that just about ripped the basketball world in half.
雷霆队必须像其他人一样飞向那里，最终，杜兰特做出了一个几乎将篮球世界撕成两半的选择。
He left OKC to join the Golden State Warriors, the best team in the league, one of the greatest teams in history and the team that just barely knocked the Thunder out of the playoffs five weeks earlier.
他离开雷霆队加盟金州勇士队，这是联盟最好的球队，历史上最伟大的球队之一，也是五周前刚刚将雷霆队淘汰出季后赛的球队。
It would have been like Jimi Hendrix, after narrowly losing a battle of the bands to the Rolling Stones, signing on as their new lead guitarist.
这就像吉米·亨德里克斯（Jimi Hendrix）在乐队与滚石乐队的较量中以微弱优势落败后，签约成为他们的新主音吉他手。
To many sports fans, Durant, like LeBron James before him, became an absolute villain.
对于许多体育迷来说，杜兰特就像他之前的勒布朗·詹姆斯一样，成为了绝对的恶棍。
He had taken player empowerment too far, critics said, violated a sacred code of competitive pride.
批评者说，他对球员的授权太过分了，违反了竞争自豪感的神圣准则。
Also, he hurt their feelings.
而且，他还伤害了他们的感情。
ESPN’s most famous bloviator, Stephen A.
ESPN 最著名的吹毛求疵者 Stephen A.
Smith, called it “the weakest move I’ve ever seen from a superstar.”
史密斯称其为“我见过的超级巨星中最弱的举动”。
Durant’s time in Golden State was basketball heaven.
杜兰特在金州的时光是篮球天堂。
His talent was jet fuel on a bonfire.
他的才华就像篝火上的喷气燃料。
The team was basically untouchable, winning two titles in three years, losing the third only because a catastrophic wave of injuries hit them at the worst possible moment — including Durant’s tearing his Achilles tendon during the 2019 finals.
这支球队基本上是不可撼动的，三年内赢得了两个冠军，失去了第三个冠军，只是因为在最糟糕的时刻遭遇了灾难性的伤病浪潮——包括杜兰特在2019年总决赛期间跟腱撕裂。
But his three Golden State seasons had also been exhausting: the gossip, the villainization, the volcanic hot takes.
但他在金州的三个赛季也让人筋疲力尽：流言蜚语、恶棍化、火山般的热门话题。
Durant now sat in California, a broken free agent, surveying the league for his next home.
杜兰特现在坐在加利福尼亚州，作为一名破碎的自由球员，正在联盟中寻找他的下一个家。
Out in Brooklyn, meanwhile, the formerly pathetic Nets had become almost sort of maybe good.
与此同时，在布鲁克林，以前可怜的篮网队几乎变得不错了。
New management had taken over and instituted a textbook rebuild: They dumped bad contracts, loaded the roster with promising young talent and set the stage for a patient, long-term, sustainable rise.
新管理层接管并进行了教科书式的重建：他们放弃了糟糕的合同，在名单上加入了有前途的年轻人才，并为耐心、长期、可持续的崛起奠定了基础。
In 2019, the Nets had actually, shockingly, made the playoffs.
2019年，篮网队竟然令人震惊地进入了季后赛。
They got stomped in the first round, but that hardly mattered.
他们在第一轮就被击败了，但这并不重要。
They had a balanced roster, a creative front office, a major media market and two maximum-salary slots to sign big stars.
他们拥有平衡的阵容、富有创造力的前台、主要的媒体市场和两个签下大明星的顶薪位置。
In the era of player empowerment, the Nets had built a perfect lightning rod to attract wandering superstars.
在球员赋权的时代，篮网打造了完美的避雷针来吸引流浪的巨星。
It took no time at all for lightning to strike.
没过多久，闪电就劈下来了。
Despite his torn Achilles, Kevin Durant was still the league’s most desirable free agent.
尽管跟腱撕裂，凯文·杜兰特仍然是联盟最令人向往的自由球员。
He could have held a month of meetings out in the Hamptons.
他本来可以在汉普顿举行一个月的会议。
But this time, he avoided any drama.
但这一次，他避免了任何戏剧性的场面。
He took zero meetings.
他参加的会议为零。
He simply informed the Nets that he would be joining their rebuilt franchise.
他只是告诉篮网他将加入他们重建的球队。
Durant has always been different this way.
杜兰特在这方面一直与众不同。
Whereas James appears to be visibly calculating his next move, at every moment, often in nakedly corporate terms — life as a series of Nike commercials — Durant tends to follow his feelings.
詹姆斯似乎每时每刻都在明显地计算着他的下一步行动，通常是赤裸裸的公司术语——就像一系列耐克广告一样，而杜兰特则倾向于跟随他的感觉。
(“The spirit of the game was talking to me,” he has said of his decision to join Golden State.) The asteroid hits where the asteroid hits.
（“比赛的精神在对我说话，”他在谈到加入金州勇士队的决定时说道。）小行星撞击到了小行星撞击的地方。
Then all the energy in the landscape flows toward it.
然后景观中的所有能量都会流向它。
Durant during the Bulls game on May 15.
杜兰特在 5 月 15 日对阵公牛队的比赛中。
Almost all his life, he has been a tremendously accurate shooter.
几乎在他的一生中，他都是一名极其精准的射手。
Credit...
信用...
Dina Litovksy/Redux, for The New York Times Durant’s friend Kyrie Irving was the other big free-agency prize of 2019 — and he, too, picked Brooklyn.
迪娜·利托夫克斯 (Dina Litovksy)/Redux，《纽约时报》报道 杜兰特的朋友凯里·欧文是 2019 年另一位自由球员大奖——他也选择了布鲁克林。
It was hard to say for sure if one superstar followed the other or if the two joined hands and jumped together.
很难确定是一个巨星追随另一个，还是两个人携手共进。
But it was clear that they came as a pair.
但很明显，他们是一对。
For the Nets, this was (as the N.B.A.
对于网队来说，这是（作为 N.B.A.
reporter Adrian Wojnarowski put it ) a “clean sweep.” The two superstars would plug right into Brooklyn’s talented young core.
记者阿德里安·沃伊纳罗夫斯基（Adrian Wojnarowski）说）“一网打尽”。这两位超级巨星将直接融入布鲁克林才华横溢的年轻核心。
They would grow together toward a championship.
他们将共同成长，走向冠军。
If you squinted and tilted your head, it almost looked like an old-fashioned institutional superteam.
如果你眯着眼睛歪着头，你会发现它几乎就像一支老式的机构超级球队。
But superteam logic is brutal, unsentimental and sometimes ugly.
但超级球队的逻辑是残酷的、不带感情的，有时甚至是丑陋的。
Big stars are not trying to wait around, season after season, for incrementally better odds at a title.
大明星不会试图一季又一季地等待，以期获得越来越好的冠军机会。
If you are going to have a superteam, why not make it every bit as super as you possibly can?
如果你要拥有一支超级团队，为什么不尽可能让它变得超级呢？
And so it happened that, in the chaos of January 2021, when Durant was fully healed and the Nets were finally in a position to see exactly what they had built, they suddenly changed again.
就这样，在 2021 年 1 月的混乱中，当杜兰特完全康复、篮网终于能够看到他们所建立的东西时，他们突然再次发生了变化。
With the blessing of their new stars, Brooklyn bundled up its best young talent — the organic, slow-cooked core of that heroic rebuild — and said goodbye.
在新星的祝福下，布鲁克林聚集了最优秀的年轻天才——英雄重建的有机、慢熟的核心——并告别了。
They traded it all away for yet another superstar: James Harden, Durant’s friend and former teammate, 2018 N.B.A.
他们用一切换来了另一位超级巨星：詹姆斯·哈登，杜兰特的朋友和前队友，2018 年 NBA 球员。
M.V.P., one of the greatest offensive players the league has ever seen.
M.V.P.，联盟有史以来最伟大的进攻球员之一。
The Nets’ Big 2 was now a Gigantic 3.
篮网队的二号位现在变成了巨型三号位。
In March, while the dust from that impact was still swirling through the air, I asked the Nets’ general manager, Sean Marks, if he ever falls asleep at night with a single tear rolling down his cheek, staring at a photo of all the young players he had to trade away.
三月份，当那次撞击造成的灰尘还在空气中飘扬时，我问篮网队总经理肖恩·马克斯，他是否曾在晚上睡着时，盯着一张他不得不交易的所有年轻球员的照片，一滴眼泪从脸颊上滚落下来。
Marks told me that yes, it hurt him a lot — he lost multiple nights of sleep and cried actual tears and made the worst phone call he’s ever had to make in his life.
马克斯告诉我，是的，这对他造成了很大的伤害——他好几个晚上都失眠了，流下了真正的眼泪，还打了他一生中打过的最糟糕的电话。
“You’re reminded,” he told me, “that this is sometimes a cruel and unjust and strange and unfair world.” And yet he would have done the trade 100 times out of 100.
“我提醒你，”他告诉我，“这有时是一个残酷、不公正、奇怪和不公平的世界。”然而，这样的交易他有一百次都会做。
Superteam logic is harsh, yes, but it is also irresistible.
是的，超级球队的逻辑很严酷，但也是不可抗拒的。
And it was now firmly in control of the Nets.
而现在已经牢牢控制了篮网队。
The Nets’ Big 3 are almost comically different, physically and spiritually and stylistically.
篮网队的三巨头无论在身体上、精神上还是风格上都几乎是滑稽的不同。
It’s like the opening screen of a video game in which you have to choose your character, each of whom comes with a different set of pros and cons.
这就像电子游戏的开场屏幕，你必须选择你的角色，每个角色都有不同的优点和缺点。
Do you want the tiny quicksilver thief (Kyrie Irving) or the burly crafty woodsman (James Harden) or the tall ethereal phantom (Kevin Durant)?
你想要小个子水银小偷（凯里·欧文）还是魁梧狡猾的樵夫（詹姆斯·哈登）还是高大空灵的幽灵（凯文·杜兰特）？
Choose carefully — your survival depends on it.
仔细选择——你的生存取决于它。
Somehow, Brooklyn figured out the cheat code that allows you to pick all three.
不知何故，布鲁克林找到了可以让你选择全部三个的作弊代码。
Kyrie Irving is short for the N.B.A., just 6-foot-2, and in a crowd of pro athletes he looks slight and vulnerable, like the little brother someone’s mom forced him to bring to the gym.
凯里·欧文是 NBA 球员中的矮个子，身高只有 6 英尺 2 英寸，在一群职业运动员中，他显得瘦弱而脆弱，就像某人妈妈强迫他带去健身房的小弟弟。
But give him the ball and watch.
但把球交给他并观看。
Irving is probably the best dribbler in the league, and he can string together long sequences of moves that baffle whole groups of defenders — street-ball fakes and spins and jukes that shift and build, one by one, like incantations, until he is suddenly levitating through empty air to score.
欧文可能是联盟中最好的运球手，他可以将一连串的动作串联起来，让整群防守者都感到困惑——街球假动作、旋转和变戏法，一个接一个地移动和构建，就像咒语一样，直到他突然悬浮在空中得分。
All the best Irving highlights unfold like this, in multiple phases, theatrically.
欧文所有最好的亮点都是这样在多个阶段、戏剧性地展开的。
Act I: He confuses the defender immediately in front of him with some move the rest of the N.B.A.
第一幕：他用NBA其他球员的一些动作迷惑了他面前的防守者。
will later study in slow motion, over and over, looking for clues — and then when that defender scrambles madly to recover, Irving will unleash Act II, in which he uses the overcorrection to his own advantage, spinning off into a new opening, where for Act III he will square his shoulders and gather the ball as if he’s about to shoot, sending all the nearby help defenders leaping to try to block the shot — but of course he was only faking the shot, and now he is dribbling into Act IV, driving all the way to the hoop, leaping at the rim, which is guarded by the biggest player on the floor, who is somehow a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than Irving and whose whole professional job depends on his ability to swat the ball away when little guys try to shoot — but Irving goes flying toward him anyway, and the big man leaps, body and spirit, to spike the layup into the crowd, but at the last possible millisecond Irving hits him with Act V, in which he switches the ball to his left hand, thrusts it away from his body and then whips his wrist, putting so much spin on the ball that it’s like one of those trick shots you sometimes see on a pool table, those looping optical illusions that seem to defy geometry and physics: Irving’s layup hits the backboard way out on the edge, where a normal layup would never hit, so far from the traditional spot in fact that any grade-school basketball coach would blow his whistle immediately and be like, “Kids, we need to take this practice seriously, I am not out here spending my Saturday so you can fling balls willy-nilly at the glass like clowns, now line back up and start again” — except Irving’s ball hits that ridiculous spot, right on the edge of the coordinate grid of the possible, and it is loaded with so much twisting left-handed spin that as soon as it touches the glass it fires off, at a weird angle, directly through the hoop.
之后，他会用慢动作一遍又一遍地学习，寻找线索——然后当防守者疯狂地争抢恢复时，欧文就会发动第二幕，他利用过度矫正来为自己谋取优势，转而进入一个新的空当，而第三幕中，他会摆正肩膀并收集球，就好像他要投篮一样，让附近的所有协防球员跳起来试图挡住投篮——但当然，他只是假装投篮，现在他是运球进入第四幕，一路突破篮筐，跃向篮筐，篮筐由场上最大的球员防守，不知何故，他比欧文高一英尺，重 100 磅，他的整个职业工作取决于他在小球员试图投篮时将球拍走的能力 - 但欧文无论如何都飞向他，大个子跳跃，身体和精神，将上篮刺入人群，但在最后可能的毫秒欧文用第五幕击中了他，他将球换到左手，将球从身体上推开，然后猛击手腕，使球旋转如此之大，就像你有时在台球桌上看到的那些技巧投篮一样，那些循环视错觉似乎违背了几何学和物理学：欧文的上篮击中了篮板的边缘，这是正常的上篮永远不会击中的地方，事实上，与传统的位置相距甚远，任何小学篮球教练都会吹掉他的球。立即吹口哨，然后说，“孩子们，我们需要认真对待这个练习，我不是在外面度过周六，所以你们可以像小丑一样随意地将球扔向玻璃，现在重新排队并重新开始”——除了欧文的球击中了那个荒谬的点，就在可能的坐标网格的边缘，并且它充满了如此多的扭曲的左手旋转，一旦它接触到玻璃，它就会以奇怪的角度直接穿过玻璃箍。
All along, act by act, the crowd is going “ooh” and then “ah” and then “OOOOHHH,” and after Irving scores they are chanting “M.V.P.,” and although the whole drama took only about five seconds and was worth just 2 points — the same as the most boring baseline jumper — it was so much more than that.
自始至终，观众们一幕接一幕地发出“哦”、“啊”、“OOOOHHH”的声音，在欧文得分后，他们高呼“M.V.P.”，虽然整个戏剧只花了大约五秒钟，只值 2 分——与最无聊的底线跳投相同——但它的意义远不止于此。
Every possession, for Irving, is a hero’s journey.
对于欧文来说，每一次控球都是英雄之旅。
And that’s just one of the Big 3 — probably the one who would get picked last in gym class.
这只是三巨头之一——可能是体育课上最后被选中的一个。
James Harden stands as thick as two Kyrie Irvings.
詹姆斯·哈登的身高相当于两个凯里·欧文。
He has a volcanic plug of a black beard, and in many ways he hardly looks like a pro basketball player.
他留着火山般的黑胡子，从很多方面来看，他看起来都不像职业篮球运动员。
The internet loves to pass photos around of Harden looking borderline chunky, and he is notorious around the league for partying all night long, and it is possible that in his entire life he has never been the fastest player in a gym.
互联网上喜欢流传哈登看起来矮胖的照片，他在联盟中因彻夜狂欢而臭名昭著，而且他可能一生都不是健身房里速度最快的球员。
(His fellow N.B.A.
（他的 NBA 同胞
superstar Russell Westbrook, who played against Harden as a child in Los Angeles, remembers him, even then, as “a little chubby left-handed dude.”) And yet Harden is a one-man basketball revolution.
超级巨星拉塞尔·威斯布鲁克小时候在洛杉矶与哈登交手，即使在那时，他也记得他是“一个胖乎乎的左撇子”。）然而，哈登是一场单人篮球革命。
No defender in the league can guard him one on one.
联盟中没有哪个后卫能够一对一防守他。
He is so shifty and tricky and clever and quick, so deceptively skilled, that his defenders frequently end up starring in humiliating GIFs.
他如此狡猾、狡猾、聪明、敏捷，技巧如此令人迷惑，以至于他的防守者经常在羞辱性的 GIF 中成为主角。
Harden’s most famous highlight is probably the time he juked someone so hard that the defender crumpled to the floor and Harden stood there, watching, for what felt like an hour, and then actually licked his lips before swishing the open shot.
哈登最著名的亮点可能是有一次他把某人打得如此厉害，以至于防守者瘫倒在地，哈登站在那里，看着，感觉长达一个小时，然后在空位投篮前舔了舔嘴唇。
Harden’s signature move is characteristically weird: the stepback 3-pointer, in which he picks up his dribble very far from the hoop and then basically runs and hops backward , away from the basket, making an already long and difficult shot even longer and much more difficult, because — contrary to normal basketball logic — he decided that there was all this unused space behind him that was just going to waste, space that no one had ever really thought to exploit.
哈登的标志性动作很怪异：后撤步三分球，他在离篮筐很远的地方运球，然后基本上向后跑跳，远离篮筐，使本来就很长、很困难的投篮变得更长、更困难，因为——与正常的篮球逻辑相反——他认为他身后所有这些未使用的空间只会被浪费，没有人真正想过要利用的空间。
So Harden started exploiting the hell out of it, and he became so good at it that it destroyed whole coaching schemes.
所以哈登开始充分利用它，他变得如此擅长，以至于摧毁了整个教练计划。
Out of pure desperation, teams started positioning defenders right on Harden’s left shoulder — a place no defender ever needed to stand before.
出于纯粹的绝望，球队开始将防守者放在哈登的左肩上——以前没有防守者需要站在这个地方。
They were begging him to drive to the hoop, to please shoot layups.
他们恳求他冲向篮筐，上篮得分。
Please, score 2 easy points on us!
请为我们轻松获得 2 分！
Anything but the stepback 3!
除了后撤步3之外什么都可以！
The best of the three superstars, however, is Kevin Durant.
然而，三位超级巨星中最好的是凯文·杜兰特。
Durant is nearly seven feet tall, and he shoots 30-footers as if they are layups, and if any player has ever looked more natural or graceful on a basketball court, I have never seen him.
杜兰特身高近七英尺，他投篮30英尺就像上篮一样，如果有哪个球员在篮球场上看起来更自然或更优雅，我从来没有见过他。
Durant’s keynote is ease.
杜兰特的基调是轻松。
He moves with a pure, unforced economy of motion, a frictionless glide, that makes him look almost indifferent to the action around him.
他的动作是纯粹的、非受迫的、无摩擦的滑行，这让他看起来对周围的动作几乎漠不关心。
He looks so elemental on a basketball court that you almost expect to find him mentioned in James Naismith’s 13 original rules for the game.
他在篮球场上看起来是如此的自然，以至于你几乎希望在詹姆斯·奈史密斯最初的 13 条比赛规则中看到他的身影。
(8.
(8.
A goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket — also someday there will be a man named Kevin Durant, he will perfectly express how this game is supposed to look, he gets it better than I do, I am just writing all this stuff down so the game exists when he comes along.) Durant has been so good, so consistently, for so long that the biggest drama surrounding his career has always been where he chooses to play.
当球从地面投掷或击入篮筐时，就应该进球——而且有一天，会有一个叫凯文·杜兰特的人，他会完美地表达这场比赛应该是什么样子，他比我做得更好，我只是把所有这些东西写下来，这样当他出现时比赛就存在了。）杜兰特一直如此出色，如此始终如一，以至于围绕他职业生涯的最大戏剧始终是他选择打球的地方。
When he decides to leave a franchise, it feels sort of like finding out that the Grand Canyon has decided to move to Sweden.
当他决定离开特许经营权时，感觉有点像发现大峡谷已决定搬到瑞典。
In conclusion, each of the Nets’ three superstars makes you shake your head and say “wow,” but in an entirely different way.
总之，篮网队的三位超级巨星中的每一位都会让你摇头说“哇”，但方式完全不同。
For Irving, the wow means: I cannot believe he just pulled that move off.
对于欧文来说，惊叹意味着：我不敢相信他竟然成功完成了这一举动。
For Harden, it means: I cannot believe that that guy right there just did all of that to all those other guys, what is happening, are we all on some kind of prank show?
对于哈登来说，这意味着：我不敢相信那个家伙对所有其他人做了所有这些事情，发生了什么事，我们都在参加某种恶作剧吗？
For Durant, the wow is the same wow you say when you see the ocean for the first time or look into a volcano — it is the wow of the sublime, of witnessing a force so beautiful and grand and elegant and simple and natural and enduring that it makes you feel, by contrast, small and lumpy and clumsy and soft.
对杜兰特来说，这种哇的感觉就像你第一次看到海洋或第一次看到火山时所说的“哇”一样——这是崇高的哇，见证了一种如此美丽、宏伟、优雅、简单、自然和持久的力量，相比之下，它让你感觉自己渺小、笨重、笨拙和柔软。
And yet, you would never choose not to look at it if you could.
然而，如果可以的话，你永远不会选择不看它。
Could the Brooklyn Nets experiment possibly work?
布鲁克林篮网队的实验可能成功吗？
The Nets’ three superstars are all basketball geniuses, but they can all also be described, quite fairly, as “moody.” Each one, in his own special way, has managed to leave a trail of drama and destruction in the wake of an otherwise illustrious career: jilted former teams, on-court tantrums, P.R.
篮网队的三位巨星都是篮球天才，但他们也都可以用“喜怒无常”来形容。每个人都以自己独特的方式，在辉煌的职业生涯之后留下了一系列戏剧性和破坏性的痕迹：被前球队抛弃、场上发脾气、公关。
blunders, playoff flameouts.
失误，季后赛熄火。
As young teammates in Oklahoma City, Durant and Harden once got so heated in practice that they had to be separated — and weeks later Harden, who had grown tired of playing in the shadow of superstar teammates, was traded to Houston.
作为俄克拉荷马城的年轻队友，杜兰特和哈登曾经在训练中变得非常激烈，以至于他们不得不分开——几周后，厌倦了在超级巨星队友的阴影下打球的哈登被交易到休斯顿。
Kyrie Irving, meanwhile, won a championship in Cleveland with LeBron James but then requested a trade.
与此同时，凯里·欧文与勒布朗·詹姆斯一起在克利夫兰赢得了总冠军，但随后请求交易。
The Boston Celtics welcomed him as a conquering hero, and he reciprocated the love (“If you guys will have me back, I plan on re-signing here”), until suddenly he didn’t.
波士顿凯尔特人队欢迎他作为征服英雄，他也回报了这种爱（“如果你们愿意让我回来，我计划在这里重新签约”），直到突然他没有这样做。
After months of bickering and drama and passive-aggressive quotes and Instagram essays with weird capitalization, Irving left Boston, to a chorus of jeers, to join Durant in Brooklyn.
经过几个月的争吵、戏剧性事件、消极攻击性的引言以及奇怪的大写字母的 Instagram 文章后，欧文在一片嘲笑声中离开了波士顿，前往布鲁克林与杜兰特会合。
Back in Houston, Harden, who had established himself over eight seasons as a superstar, forced the trade that would allow him to join the fun in Brooklyn, too.
回到休斯敦，哈登已经在八个赛季中确立了自己的超级巨星地位，他强迫交易，这也让他能够加入布鲁克林的乐趣。
It would be hard to assemble a more eccentric trio.
很难组建一个比这更古怪的三人组了。
Irving once suggested that the earth was flat, and then when everyone went crazy tried to claim that he said it only to make everyone go crazy.
欧文曾经提出地球是平的，然后当每个人都疯狂的时候，他试图声称他这么说只是为了让每个人都疯狂。
(“It was all an exploitation tactic.
（“这都是一种剥削策略。
It literally spun the world, your guys’ world, it spun it into a frenzy and proved exactly what I thought it would do in terms of how all this works.”) James Harden partied maskless in Las Vegas during the pandemic and then shuffled his way through actual professional games with the effort of a teenage boy unloading a dishwasher at 6 a.m.
它确实旋转了世界，你们球员的世界，它旋转到了疯狂，并证明了我认为它会做什么。”）詹姆斯·哈登在大流行期间在拉斯维加斯不戴口罩参加派对，然后像一个早上 6 点从洗碗机里卸下东西的十几岁男孩一样拖着脚步参加真正的职业比赛。
K.D.
K.D.
got himself in trouble on Twitter and then in more trouble on Twitter.
他自己在推特上遇到了麻烦，然后又在推特上遇到了更多的麻烦。
How could these three players, with their infinity of moods, possibly coexist?
这三个心情无限的玩家，怎么可能共存？
Especially through the volatile, gossipy, drama-filled grind of an N.B.A.
尤其是在 NBA 的动荡、八卦、充满戏剧性的磨练中。
season?
季节？
Especially when anything less than a championship would be seen as an embarrassing failure?
尤其是当任何低于冠军的事情都被视为令人尴尬的失败时？
Especially in a wild, compressed pandemic season in which normal chemistry-building exercises (team meals, hangouts, practices) were largely impossible?
尤其是在一个狂野、压缩的大流行季节，正常的化学反应练习（团队聚餐、聚会、训练）基本上是不可能的？
Even in the best circumstances, moods are unpredictable.
即使在最好的情况下，情绪也是不可预测的。
As Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, “Our moods do not believe in each other.”
正如拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson）曾经说过的那样，“我们的情绪互相不信任。”
As it turns out, the superstars hardly got a chance to coexist at all.
事实证明，超级巨星几乎没有共存的机会。
This season seemed to be cursed.
这个季节似乎被诅咒了。
Brooklyn’s Big 3 played together, all year, for only about 200 minutes.
布鲁克林三巨头全年都在一起打球，时间只有大约 200 分钟。
It was an endless series of minor accidents and misunderstandings and unsynced timelines.
这是一系列没完没了的小事故、误解和不同步的时间线。
Kyrie Irving disappeared for a while, mysteriously missing seven games for what the Nets called “personal reasons.” (The gossip flying around the media section of Barclays Center would have singed your eyebrows off.) Kevin Durant got swallowed, as who among us has not been, by health and safety protocols — “Free me,” he tweeted, virally — and then tweaked his left hamstring, and what was supposed to be a short absence turned into nearly two months, 23 straight Durant-less games — and then just before he came back, James Harden, who does not get injured, got injured.
凯里·欧文消失了一段时间，由于篮网队所谓的“个人原因”神秘缺席了七场比赛。 （巴克莱中心媒体区的流言蜚语一定会让你大吃一惊。）凯文·杜兰特被健康和安全协议吞没了——我们当中谁没有被健康和安全协议吞没——“释放我，”他在推特上疯传——然后扭伤了他的左腿筋，原本应该短暂缺席的事情变成了近两个月、连续23场杜兰特缺席的比赛——然后就在他回来之前，没有受伤的詹姆斯·哈登受伤了。
Then Durant got kneed very hard in the thigh, right in his Rick James tattoo, and Irving got hit in the face, and the season was suddenly over.
然后杜兰特的大腿被狠狠地膝盖撞了一下，就在他的里克·詹姆斯纹身处，欧文的脸也被击中，赛季突然结束了。
The whole thing felt like the old logic puzzle about the fox and the chicken and the grain, where you can ferry only two of them across the river at once, and if you pick the wrong pair one of them will be eaten — and somehow we were always picking the wrong pair of Nets.
整件事感觉就像关于狐狸、鸡和谷物的古老逻辑谜题，你一次只能将其中两只渡过河，如果你选错了一对，其中一只就会被吃掉——不知怎的，我们总是选错一对网。
In a 72-game season, Brooklyn used 38 different starting lineups.
在 72 场比赛的赛季中，布鲁克林使用了 38 种不同的首发阵容。
It was chaos.
一片混乱。
By the end of the season, I had seen more rappers named “Lil” at Barclays Center (Lil’ Kim, Lil Baby) than I had seen games featuring the Big 3.
到赛季结束时，我在巴克莱中心看到的名为“Lil”的说唱歌手（Lil' Kim、Lil Baby）比我看到的三巨头比赛还要多。
And yet, somehow, out on the floor, the Brooklyn Nets were amazing.
然而，不知怎的，在球场上，布鲁克林篮网队的表现却令人惊叹。
I am not, personally, a big fan of superteams — I am old-school and snobbish, a connoisseur of chemistry and underdogs and all that antique stuff.
就我个人而言，我并不是超级球队的忠实粉丝——我是老派和势利者，是化学和失败者以及所有这些古董的鉴赏家。
But the Nets won me over.
但网队赢得了我的青睐。
Even without the full Big 3, their offense was overwhelming.
即使没有三巨头，他们的进攻也是压倒性的。
Harden controlled games like a puppeteer, making defenders lean and spin and run into one another, making their legs fly out from under them, making mediocre teammates look like All-Stars, driving past his man and then — at the exact nanosecond someone else stepped forward — lobbing the ball to a suddenly open teammate for a dunk.
哈登就像一个木偶操纵者一样控制着比赛，让防守者倾斜、旋转、互相冲撞，让他们的腿从他们身下飞出，让平庸的队友看起来像全明星，突破他的防守者，然后——就在另一人站出来的那一刻——把球传给一个突然空位的队友扣篮。
He made shots that looked like yo-yo tricks.
他的投篮看起来就像溜溜球一样。
I saw the Nets start a game by making 13 of their first 16 shots.
我看到篮网队开局前16投13中。
I saw them score 42 points in a single quarter.
我看到他们单节拿下42分。
(For much of N.B.A.
（对于 NBA 的大部分时间
history, 42 would have been a perfectly respectable halftime score.) It was a pure expression of basketball joy.
历史上，42 将会是一个完全值得尊敬的半场得分。）这是篮球乐趣的纯粹表达。
Multiple times, they had me laughing out loud.
有好几次，他们让我笑出声来。
And their defense!
还有他们的防守！
That, too, made me LOL.
这也让我哈哈大笑。
It was almost as bad as their offense was good.
这几乎和他们的进攻一样糟糕。
Brooklyn’s defense was so bad that it sometimes felt like art — rich with meaning, a Dada masterpiece, a problematization of the very notion of defense.
布鲁克林的防守太糟糕了，有时感觉就像艺术——富有意义，是达达主义的杰作，是防守概念本身的问题化。
It was as if the Nets wanted the other team to have as much fun out there as they were having.
就好像篮网队希望其他球队能像他们一样享受比赛的乐趣。
Opposing stars got to take turns looking like Wilt Chamberlain.
对手球星必须轮流看起来像威尔特·张伯伦。
Score all you want, the Nets seemed to say — you will never score as much as we do.
网队似乎在说，你想要得分就得分——你永远不会得分像我们一样多。
If we need to, we will beat you 391-386.
如果需要的话，我们会以 391-386 击败你。
And it worked.
它奏效了。
Over one particularly hot stretch, the Nets won 14 out of 15 games.
在一段特别激烈的比赛中，篮网队赢得了 15 场比赛中的 14 场。
Kevin Durant missed that stretch.
凯文·杜兰特错过了那段时光。
He was, for much of the season, the man in the shadows.
在整个赛季的大部分时间里，他都是一个隐藏在阴影中的人。
He came to games and sat on the bench, often with a black hood over his head and a black mask over his mouth, looking like a ninja assistant coach.
他来观看比赛，坐在替补席上，头上经常戴着黑色兜帽，嘴上戴着黑色面具，看起来就像一个忍者助理教练。
I watched him watching, game after game, and I wondered when we might see him again, playing basketball, back in his element.
我看着他一场又一场地观看比赛，我想知道我们什么时候才能再次见到他，打篮球，回到他的状态。
Once, in the middle of Durant’s longest injury absence, I got to see him shoot around before a game.
有一次，在杜兰特因伤缺席最长一段时间期间，我在比赛前看到他投篮。
He was wearing all black (hat, T-shirt, shorts, leggings, shoes) and moving with that signature Durant economy of motion, the unmistakable posture and gait, as if his joints were full of ball bearings.
他穿着全黑的衣服（帽子、T 恤、短裤、紧身裤、鞋子），以杜兰特标志性的简洁动作、明确无误的姿势和步态移动，就好像他的关节充满了滚珠轴承。
He was, as always, as he has been almost all his life, a ridiculously accurate shooter.
一如既往，几乎一生都是如此，他是一位精准得可笑的射手。
When Durant makes a shot, its swish seems extra pure — the ball hovers inside the net for a second, as if it lives there, as if it wants to take its time and really enjoy itself before it falls.
当杜兰特投篮时，它的嗖嗖声显得格外纯粹——球在网内盘旋了一秒钟，就好像它就生活在那里，好像它想在落下之前慢慢地享受自己的乐趣。
I watched Durant shoot for 10, 20, 30 minutes, until he was the only player left on the floor.
我看了杜兰特投篮10分钟、20分钟、30分钟，直到他成为场上唯一剩下的球员。
He seemed to never want to stop.
他似乎永远都不想停下来。
I watched him shoot many 3-pointers in a row, first off two feet and then off one foot, and then he started shooting free throws.
我看着他连续投了很多个三分球，先是两脚投篮，然后是单脚投篮，然后他开始罚球。
The whole ritual felt truly obsessive, like a chase for perfection.
整个仪式让人感觉真正着迷，就像对完美的追求。
Durant left the floor eventually, but only so the actual game could start.
杜兰特最终离开了球场，但这只是为了让真正的比赛能够开始。
Then he came back out, with his mask and hoodie on, and took his place silently at the end of the bench.
然后他戴着口罩和连帽衫回来，默默地坐在长凳的一端。
One day in late April, when Kevin Durant’s hamstring was fully healed but his thigh was freshly bruised, I visited him in New York.
四月下旬的一天，当凯文·杜兰特的腿筋完全痊愈，但他的大腿刚刚擦伤时，我去纽约拜访了他。
In the player-empowerment era, the biggest stars tend to have their own corporations.
在球员赋权的时代，最大牌的明星往往拥有自己的公司。
Durant’s is called Thirty Five Ventures, and it operates out of a suite of offices in Lower Manhattan.
杜兰特的公司名为“三十五风险投资公司”，在曼哈顿下城设有一套办公室。
Durant lives nearby.
杜兰特就住在附近。
He wasn’t there yet when I arrived, so I sat on a big couch and studied the office’s art: two sculptures, by the artist Ron English, of the cartoon character Charlie Brown — except that Charlie’s face is split open across the middle, like an overripe fig, to reveal a skull with a skeletal smile.
我到达时他还没到，所以我坐在一张大沙发上研究办公室的艺术品：艺术家罗恩·英格利希 (Ron English) 创作的两尊卡通人物查理·布朗 (Charlie Brown) 的雕塑——只不过查理的脸从中间裂开，就像一颗熟透的无花果，露出骷髅般的微笑。
Eventually Durant showed up.
最终杜兰特出现了。
He wore a black Malcolm X hat and a black Nas hoodie and some truly wonderful pants: long and soft and fuzzy, with zippers on the pockets and drawstrings on the ankles and a hypnotic paisley pattern.
他戴着一顶黑色的 Malcolm X 帽子，一件黑色的 Nas 连帽衫，还有一条真正美妙的裤子：又长又柔软，毛茸茸的，口袋上有拉链，脚踝上有抽绳，还有催眠的佩斯利图案。
Durant had a few things to take care of in the office that day: paperwork to sign, jerseys to autograph, a podcast with ESPN.
那天杜兰特在办公室有几件事要处理：要签署的文件、要签名的球衣、ESPN 的播客。
I watched him stand on a sunny balcony and pose for photos holding a Major League Soccer trophy.
我看着他站在阳光明媚的阳台上，举着美国职业足球大联盟的奖杯摆姿势拍照。
(Durant is a part owner of the Philadelphia Union.) I sat in on a meeting while Durant and his team strategized with a Nike rep about a forthcoming apparel line and some shoe releases that were still several years away.
（杜兰特是费城联盟的股东之一。）我参加了一次会议，杜兰特和他的团队与耐克代表就即将推出的服装系列和一些距离几年后发布的鞋子制定了战略。
After a while, Durant led me back to his office to talk.
过了一会儿，杜兰特带我回到他的办公室谈话。
Given the setting, I assumed that I would be interviewing Business Durant: that he would be on message and strategic, a relentless ambassador for his brand, full of references to his favorite start-ups and causes.
鉴于这种背景，我假设我会采访《商业》杜兰特：他将在信息和战略上，成为他品牌的不懈大使，充满对他最喜欢的初创企业和事业的提及。
Thirty Five Ventures has a wide, eclectic portfolio: investments in more than 70 early-stage tech and private-equity companies, initiatives to fund women’s sports, a sports-business media network called Boardroom.
35 Ventures 拥有广泛、不拘一格的投资组合：对 70 多家早期科技和私募股权公司进行投资，资助女性体育项目，以及名为 Boardroom 的体育商业媒体网络。
Durant has invested heavily in Prince George’s County, where he grew up.
杜兰特在他长大的乔治王子县投入了大量资金。
He paid to renovate the rec center where he learned to play basketball and founded a college prep program, the College Track at the Durant Center, where local kids can hang out and receive free food and tutoring.
他出钱翻修了娱乐中心，在那里他学会了打篮球，并在杜兰特中心创办了一个大学预科项目，即杜兰特中心的大学跑道，当地的孩子可以在那里闲逛并获得免费食物和辅导。
This year, Durant was an executive producer on a short film about police violence called “Two Distant Strangers,” which won an Academy Award.
今年，杜兰特担任了一部关于警察暴力的短片《两个遥远的陌生人》的执行制片人，该短片获得了奥斯卡金像奖。
But the Durant I met was not at all a brand ambassador.
但我遇到的杜兰特根本不是品牌大使。
Instead he lowered himself, in slow motion, onto a long couch and asked, sincerely, “What do you want to talk about?” I said, only 20 percent joking, the meaning of life.
相反，他慢吞吞地倒在一张长沙发上，真诚地问道：“你想聊什么？”我说，只有20%开玩笑，人生的意义。
This seemed to make him happy.
这似乎让他很高兴。
We proceeded to sit there and talk for a very long time, sinking deeper and deeper into the couch, about his childhood and Chesapeake Bay and meditation and crabs and Twitter.
我们坐在那里聊了很长时间，在沙发上越陷越深，谈论他的童年、切萨皮克湾、冥想、螃蟹和推特。
The K.D.
K.D.
who hosted me that afternoon was relaxed and talkative and full of questions, both rhetorical and actual, and he seemed to have all the time in the world.
那天下午接待我的人很轻松，健谈，充满了问题，无论是口头的还是实际的，他似乎有所有的时间。
It felt less like an interview than like a therapy session or a late-night dorm-room philosophy jag.
感觉与其说是一次采访，不如说是一次治疗或深夜宿舍里的哲学大讨论。
This was all classic Durant.
这都是典型的杜兰特。
In a sports world defined by tough-guy posturing and bulletproof messaging, he has always come off as something else: a thinker and a searcher and a wandering soul.
在一个以硬汉姿态和防弹信息为特征的体育世界里，他总是给人一种不同的感觉：一个思想家、一个探索者和一个流浪的灵魂。
In interviews, he will abandon the script of jock clichés and drop right into existential dread.
在采访中，他会放弃运动员陈词滥调的剧本，直接陷入存在主义的恐惧之中。
“I go to sleep at night, like, ‘Am I going to be alone forever?’” he once told Zach Baron of GQ.
“我晚上睡觉时会想，‘我会永远孤独吗？’”他曾经告诉《GQ》杂志的扎克·巴伦 (Zach Baron)。
And to Michael Lee of The Athletic : “I’ve been roaming my whole life.
对于 The Athletic 的迈克尔·李 (Michael Lee) 来说：“我一生都在漫游。
I never had no stable environment.
我从来没有没有过稳定的环境。
Ever.
曾经。
Ever.
曾经。
Since I woke up.” Durant has spoken publicly about how important it is to cry.
自从我醒来之后。”杜兰特曾公开谈论哭泣的重要性。
If Michael Jordan were a Dostoyevsky character, he would be Kevin Durant.
如果迈克尔·乔丹是陀思妥耶夫斯基的人物，那么他就是凯文·杜兰特。
This level of openness, at this level of superfame, is sometimes terrifying to see — it feels like watching an astronaut take his helmet off on the moon.
这种程度的开放性，这种程度的超级名气，有时令人感到恐惧——感觉就像看着宇航员在月球上摘下头盔一样。
The world of sports media is basically where American men go to avoid therapy, where they can project their wounds and failings onto strangers and referees.
体育媒体的世界基本上是美国男人逃避治疗的地方，他们可以将自己的伤口和失败投射到陌生人和裁判身上。
To be a celebrity in that world — a celebrity so big that major media companies pay their bills by telling stories about you — can just about strip flesh from the bone.
成为那个世界的名人——一个大到各大媒体公司通过讲述你的故事来支付账单的名人——几乎可以剥去骨头上的肉。
Most N.B.A.
大多数 N.B.A.
stars adopt protective strategies.
明星采取保护策略。
James Harden is famously distant: He lives, as he puts it, in a “box.” Kyrie Irving has spent much of this season on a sort of spiritual retreat from reporters — so much so that the N.B.A.
詹姆斯·哈登的疏远是出了名的：正如他所说，他生活在一个“盒子”里。凯里·欧文本赛季的大部分时间都在躲避记者的精神静修——以至于 N.B.A.
fined him $25,000 for violating its media policy.
因违反媒体政策而对其处以 25,000 美元罚款。
(“I do not speak to Pawns,” Irving posted on Instagram afterward.
（欧文随后在 Instagram 上发帖称：“我不会和 Pawns 说话。”
“My time is worth more.”)
“我的时间更有价值。”）
Kevin Durant, by contrast, is radically open.
相比之下，凯文·杜兰特则非常开放。
He walks around in his fame like a raw nerve.
他像神经质一样，在自己的名声中四处走动。
He speaks and feels and changes his mind, contradicting himself, allowing people to see him in all kinds of moods.
他说话、感受、改变主意，自相矛盾，让人们看到他的各种心情。
“The world is bigger than my little box,” Durant told me.
“世界比我的小盒子还要大，”杜兰特告诉我。
“I’m not going to be playing this game forever.
“我不会永远玩这个游戏。
So I can’t be expected to stay in this box.” He laughed.
所以我不能指望留在这个盒子里。”他笑了。
“Like: ‘This is the K.D.
“就像：‘这是 K.D.
box.’ Who gives a [expletive]?
盒子。’谁给出[脏话]？
It’s been billions of people on this earth.
地球上有数十亿人。
We really are small, if you look at it from a universe perspective.”
如果你从宇宙的角度来看，我们真的很小。”
I asked Durant if he had ever been to therapy.
我问杜兰特是否接受过治疗。
He said no. But he told me he meditates constantly, every day.
他说不。但他告诉我他每天都在不断地冥想。
Not formally, cross-legged, like a Buddhist.
不正式，盘腿，像个佛教徒。
He meditates just by doing normal things.
他只是通过做正常的事情来冥想。
Shooting a free throw, he said, is meditation.
他说，罚球是冥想。
Conversation with the right person is meditation.
与正确的人交谈就是冥想。
It feels like meditation, to Durant, to drive through New York City in his Tesla, blasting music, looking at the swirls of people, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on his way to the practice facility.
对杜兰特来说，开着他的特斯拉穿过纽约市，放着音乐，看着人群，穿过布鲁克林大桥前往训练场，这感觉就像冥想。
Durant is always searching, in all the noise, for relief, simplicity, stillness.
杜兰特总是在喧嚣中寻找解脱、简单、宁静。
“There’s a lot of stuff that we get distracted by, or we chasing, to make us feel a certain way,” Durant said.
“有很多东西让我们分心，或者我们追逐，让我们有某种感觉，”杜兰特说。
“When it’s really basic.
“当它真的很基本的时候。
We should just be experiencing everything as human beings, as much as we can.
我们应该作为人类，尽可能多地体验一切。
Being normal amongst each other.”
彼此之间保持正常。”
He paused.
他停了下来。
Durant is hyperaware of how he is perceived.
杜兰特非常清楚人们如何看待他。
He is aware that people are aware of his awareness.
他知道人们也知道他的意识。
And of course he has a question about that, too.
当然他对此也有疑问。
“Is that a bad thing?” he asked.
“这是一件坏事吗？”他问道。
“To be aware?”
“要知道吗？”
Kevin Durant’s very first memory is sitting in a stroller on his grandmother’s porch, strapped in, just watching.
凯文·杜兰特的第一个记忆是坐在祖母门廊上的婴儿车里，系着安全带，只是看着。
This was sometime around 1990, in Capitol Heights, Md., in Prince George’s County — in between the waters of Chesapeake Bay and the White House.
那是 1990 年左右的某个时间，在马里兰州乔治王子县的国会山高地，位于切萨皮克湾和白宫水域之间。
(“Gateway to the Nation’s Capital,” a sign says.) The house was small, with yellow siding; its porch was carpeted with green synthetic grass.
（一块牌子上写着：“通往国家首都的门户”。）房子很小，壁板是黄色的。它的门廊上铺着绿色的人造草。
In Durant’s first memory, it is dark outside, and he is calm, looking around, inhaling the world through his big, watchful eyes: the chain-link fences, the tree in the yard, the big dim sky.
在杜兰特的最初记忆中，外面很黑，他很平静，环顾四周，通过他警觉的大眼睛吸入这个世界：铁丝网、院子里的树、昏暗的大天空。
Adults are passing here and there, talking, and Durant doesn’t understand any of it, but that doesn’t bother him.
大人们到处走过，说话，杜兰特听不懂，但这并不困扰他。
The vibe is chill.
气氛很冷。
Secure.
安全的。
He remembers most of all feeling secure.
他记得最重要的是感到安全。
His mother, Wanda Durant, told me that tiny Kevin would have been in that stroller because she needed a break.
他的母亲万达·杜兰特告诉我，小凯文会坐在婴儿车里，因为她需要休息一下。
Five minutes.
五分钟。
She had two boys, her first at just 18, and Kevin was the second, and although he was almost no trouble at all — he hardly cried, didn’t look for attention, knew how to calm himself down all on his own by sucking his thumb — as soon as he could walk he was like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing off every surface in the world.
她有两个儿子，她的第一个儿子才 18 岁，凯文是第二个，虽然他几乎没有什么麻烦——他几乎不哭，不寻求关注，知道如何通过吸吮拇指来让自己平静下来——但一旦他能走路，他就像一个乒乓球，在世界上的每一个表面上弹跳。
So once in a while Wanda would give herself a break, strapping him in and just letting him sit.
所以旺达偶尔会给自己休息一下，给他系上安全带，让他坐着。
This was, and remains, Durant’s natural mode: looking.
这曾经是，现在仍然是杜兰特的自然模式：看。
He was from the start mild and quiet.
他从一开始就温和而安静。
He studied other children to see what they were doing and how it was being received.
他研究了其他孩子，看看他们在做什么以及人们如何看待他们的行为。
He studied adults to see if they were friendly or dangerous, comfortable or stressed.
他研究成年人，看看他们是友好的还是危险的，是舒适的还是有压力的。
When he saw something he liked — a way of walking or talking or joking — he would imitate it, make it a part of himself.
当他看到他喜欢的东西——一种走路、说话或开玩笑的方式——他会模仿它，让它成为自己的一部分。
He was a big silent sponge of empathy.
他是一块沉默的同理心海绵。
“It was easy for him to connect emotionally,” his mother told me.
“他很容易在情感上建立联系，”他的母亲告诉我。
“He was loving.
“他很有爱心。
Oh, gosh, he was such a loving thing.”
哦，天哪，他真是一个充满爱心的人。”
But it was not, always, a loving world.
但这并不总是一个充满爱的世界。
This was the 1990s, during the so-called crack epidemic and the war on drugs.
那是 20 世纪 90 年代，正值所谓的快克流行病和毒品战争时期。
The population of Prince George’s County was majority Black, with pockets of deep poverty and high crime.
乔治王子县的人口以黑人为主，部分地区极度贫困，犯罪率高。
Durant remembers people walking around his neighborhood looking like zombies.
杜兰特记得，在他家附近走来走去的人们看起来就像僵尸一样。
He navigated the streets on foot, and there were so many hazards that he sometimes ran to get where he was going, and often he didn’t even use the sidewalk — he learned to run down the middle of the street after an angry dog attacked him.
他步行在街道上行走，危险太多，有时他会跑去目的地，而且通常他甚至不使用人行道——在一只愤怒的狗袭击他后，他学会了沿着街道中间跑。
Durant’s grandmother’s house was a refuge, the center of his world.
杜兰特祖母的房子是一个避难所，是他世界的中心。
It was full of women.
里面挤满了女人。
Wayne Pratt, Durant’s father, left the family when Kevin was a baby; Pratt was only 23 and grew up himself without a father, so he didn’t feel ready to be one.
杜兰特的父亲韦恩·普拉特在凯文还是个婴儿时就离开了家庭。普拉特只有 23 岁，自己在没有父亲的情况下长大，所以他觉得自己还没有准备好成为一名父亲。
Kevin saw him around the neighborhood once, and they didn’t even acknowledge each other.
凯文在附近见过他一次，他们甚至没有互相打招呼。
(Years later, his father came back into his life.) Wanda had a brother, Michael, who looked just like Kevin and even had a similar personality and would absolutely have been a kind of father figure.
（多年后，他的父亲又回到了他的生活中。）旺达有一个兄弟，迈克尔，他长得很像凯文，甚至性格也很相似，绝对是一个父亲的形象。
But Kevin’s Uncle Mike died around the same time Kevin’s father left.
但凯文的叔叔迈克在凯文的父亲离开的同时去世了。
Wanda was a strong mother.
万达是一位坚强的母亲。
For generations, American institutions had failed her family and her community — so she turned herself into an institution for her two sons.
几代人以来，美国的机构辜负了她的家庭和社区，因此她把自己变成了两个儿子的机构。
Her mind was precise and realistic, and she had plans for how her boys could fit into the world.
她的想法精确而现实，她对她的孩子们如何融入这个世界有计划。
She knew that Kevin was sensitive but also that he couldn’t afford to be soft.
她知道凯文很敏感，但也知道他不能软弱。
So she had a rule.
所以她有一个规则。
He was allowed to cry but not to whine.
他被允许哭泣，但不许发牢骚。
If you get hurt, Wanda taught him, you should express that pain, no matter what anybody else says.
万达告诉他，如果你受伤了，你应该表达出这种痛苦，不管别人怎么说。
Crying is natural.
哭泣是很自然的事。
It is the truth.
这是事实。
But whining is something else — a manipulation, an attempt to extend your pain to get something you didn’t earn.
但抱怨是另一回事——一种操纵，一种试图延长你的痛苦以获取你没有赢得的东西的行为。
Wanda’s mother, Barbara, was one of 15 siblings, not counting four who died young, and many of them lived nearby.
万达的母亲芭芭拉 (Barbara) 是 15 个兄弟姐妹之一，其中不包括早逝的四个兄弟姐妹，其中许多人住在附近。
The extended family was huge.
这个大家庭很大。
Durant remembers big Sunday dinners, crab boils, holiday feasts, colorful personalities.
杜兰特记得周日的丰盛晚餐、煮蟹、节日盛宴、丰富多彩的人物。
It was, he told me, “a real Black family.” Like you see in a Tyler Perry movie, he said.
他告诉我，这是“一个真正的黑人家庭。”就像你在泰勒·佩里的电影中看到的那样，他说。
Kevin had special affection for his Aunt Pearl, one of his grandmother’s sisters.
凯文对他祖母的姐妹之一珀尔阿姨有着特殊的感情。
She, too, lived in the yellow house.
她也住在黄色的房子里。
Aunt Pearl was, in Wanda’s words, “a marshmallow.” Soft and sweet.
用万达的话说，珀尔阿姨是“棉花糖”。又软又甜。
She’d let the kids stay up late and drink Coke and watch TV in her bedroom.
她会让孩子们熬夜，喝可乐，在卧室里看电视。
When they acted up, Aunt Pearl would threaten physical punishment — “I’m going to work on your building,” she’d say — but she rarely followed through.
当他们犯错时，珀尔阿姨会威胁要进行体罚——“我要去你们的大楼工作，”她会说——但她很少付诸行动。
(This was in stark contrast to Wanda; “I knew my mom’s hands was heavy,” Durant told me.) Aunt Pearl made Kevin sandwiches and snacks.
（这与旺达形成鲜明对比；“我知道我妈妈的手很重，”杜兰特告诉我。）珀尔阿姨给凯文做三明治和零食。
When the kids slept over they’d all pile onto a makeshift mattress next to her bed.
当孩子们睡过之后，他们都会堆在她床边的临时床垫上。
Except for Kevin, who would climb up, off the floor, and sleep in bed right next to her.
除了凯文，他会从地板上爬起来，睡在她旁边的床上。
When Kevin was 11, Aunt Pearl died.
凯文 11 岁时，珀尔阿姨去世了。
It happened in front of him.
这件事就发生在他的面前。
She had late-stage lung cancer.
她患有晚期肺癌。
One day she got up to use the bathroom but never made it back — she collapsed in the hall, struggling to breathe, and started coughing up blood, so much blood that it gushed out of her and she died, right there, in the house.
有一天，她起身去洗手间，但再也没有回来——她倒在大厅里，呼吸困难，开始咳血，大量的血从她体内喷涌而出，最后她就死在了房子里。
E.M.T.s came and cleaned her up, then laid her back in bed.
急救人员过来给她清理干净，然后把她放回床上。
Everyone was waiting for the coroner.
每个人都在等待验尸官。
Kevin walked over and climbed into the bed, as he always did, and lay down.
凯文走过去，像往常一样爬上床，躺了下来。
Just lay there next to Aunt Pearl, keeping her company.
就躺在珀尔阿姨身边，陪伴着她。
His grandmother, seeing her grandson in bed with the body of her sister, asked if Kevin was OK.
他的祖母看到孙子和姐姐的尸体躺在床上，问凯文是否还好。
“I’m not afraid of Aunt Pearl,” he said.
“我不怕珀尔阿姨，”他说。
The world inside the house was small, and Kevin was growing.
房子里的世界很小，而凯文却在成长。
Wanda worked nights at the post office, loading mail trucks, struggling to keep the family afloat.
万达晚上在邮局工作，给邮车装货，努力维持一家人的生活。
Kevin hated, more than anything else, the thought of adding to her stress.
凯文最讨厌的就是增加她的压力。
So when he had questions about life, when he wanted to talk about feelings or problems or confusions, he swallowed them.
因此，当他对生活有疑问时，当他想谈论感受、问题或困惑时，他就把它们吞了下去。
He stayed quiet.
他保持沉默。
He did his best to figure everything out on his own.
他尽最大努力自己解决一切。
“In the house, I felt like my voice was suppressed a little bit,” Durant told me.
“在家里，我觉得我的声音有点被压抑，”杜兰特告诉我。
“Not that they intentionally meant to do it.
“并不是说他们故意这么做。
It was probably all me.
大概都是我吧。
But I just felt timid around my mom, my brother, people that were older than me.
但我只是在我的妈妈、我的兄弟以及那些比我年长的人面前感到胆怯。
So I held a lot of stuff in.” He added, “The natural me, I held it in a bit, just to not cause any trouble, to not get in anybody’s way.”
所以我里面藏了很多东西。”他补充道，“自然的我，我会克制一点，只是为了不造成任何麻烦，不妨碍任何人。”
As a modern N.B.A.
作为一名现代 N.B.A.
superstar, it is impossible to stay out of everybody’s way.
超级巨星，不可能不妨碍所有人。
Someone, somewhere, will manage to be upset about anything Kevin Durant does.
某个地方的某个人会设法对凯文·杜兰特所做的任何事情感到不安。
Wanda told me that she sometimes gets so riled up about the things people say about her son that she has to write a response, she can’t stop herself.
万达告诉我，有时她会对人们对她儿子的评价感到非常愤怒，以至于她必须写下回应，但她无法阻止自己。
But instead of posting it online she texts it to her P.R.
但她没有将其发布到网上，而是将其发短信给她的公关人员。
manager, who acknowledges her pain and then tells her not to tweet it.
经理承认了她的痛苦，然后告诉她不要发推文。
So she doesn’t.
所以她没有。
Kevin Durant takes, shall we say, a different approach.
容我们说，凯文·杜兰特采取了不同的方法。
Like most modern Americans, he spends a lot of time looking at his phone.
和大多数现代美国人一样，他花了很多时间看手机。
He looks at it in locker rooms and in business meetings and on airplanes and in down moments during conversations.
他在更衣室、商务会议、飞机上以及谈话中的低潮时刻都会审视这一点。
He showed me his lock screen: a picture of a desert nomad, alone at night, riding a camel.
他给我看了他的锁屏：一张沙漠游牧民族的照片，在夜晚独自骑着骆驼。
“That’s all of us walking in the desert by ourselves sometimes,” he told me.
“有时我们所有人都独自在沙漠中行走，”他告诉我。
Durant looks, especially, at Twitter.
杜兰特尤其关注推特。
N.B.A.
NBA
Twitter is a whole vibrant world unto itself, an extension and amplifier of all the on-court drama, and in that world K.D.
Twitter 本身就是一个充满活力的世界，是所有场上戏剧的延伸和放大器，而在这个世界中，K.D.
is a sort of trickster god.
是一种骗子之神。
He has almost 19 million followers and is famous for responding to his critics, whether they are journalists or talking heads or fellow players or random kids.
他拥有近 1900 万粉丝，并以回应批评者而闻名，无论这些批评者是记者、名嘴、玩家同伴还是随机的孩子。
“ok you’re right bro,” he once wrote to someone who called him a coward.
“好吧，兄弟，你是对的，”他曾经写信给一个称他为胆小鬼的人。
“We got that out of the way.
“我们已经解决了这个问题。
I feel u, I hear you loud and clear.
我感觉到你，我听到你大声而清晰。
You good now??”
你现在好吗？”
Not surprisingly, then, Twitter has been the source of a couple of the major gaffes of Durant’s career.
因此，毫不奇怪，推特成为了杜兰特职业生涯中几起重大失态的根源。
He once, excruciatingly, responded to a critic in the third person (“Kd can’t win a championship with those cats”) — thereby accidentally revealing that he was trying to defend himself, anonymously, from a fake account.
他曾经令人痛苦地以第三人称回应一位批评者（“Kd 无法与那些猫一起赢得冠军”），从而意外地透露了他试图匿名为自己辩护，免受虚假账户的侵害。
(The Onion recently published an article called “Kevin Durant Spends All Day Feuding With Own Burner Account.”) More recently, Durant was caught up in a furor when Michael Rapaport, a professional loudmouth, exposed a series of inflammatory messages — including sexually explicit and homophobic language — that Durant had made to him, months earlier, as the two argued in the D.M.s.
（《洋葱报》最近发表了一篇文章，名为“凯文·杜兰特整天与自己的 Burner 账户争吵。”）最近，当职业大嘴人迈克尔·拉帕波特（Michael Rapaport）曝光了杜兰特几个月前向他发出的一系列煽动性信息（包括露骨的性和恐同语言）时，杜兰特陷入了愤怒，正如两人在 D.M.s. 中争论的那样。
(The N.B.A.
（NBA.
eventually fined Durant $50,000.)
最终杜兰特被罚款 5 万美元。）
“Anybody that’s crucifying me for some [expletive] that I said behind closed doors,” Durant told me, “I would definitely love to see y’all phones.”
杜兰特告诉我：“如果有人因为我私下里说的一些[脏话]而对我进行迫害，我绝对希望看到你们所有人的手机。”
I asked Durant if, just anthropologically, I could take a peek at his Twitter mentions.
我问杜兰特，从人类学角度来看，我是否可以看一下他在推特上提到的内容。
He said no. But he described them for me.
他说不。但他为我描述了它们。
“It’s like: ‘u a bitch.’ ‘u soft.’ ‘u insecure.’ ‘i love u kd, can you respond?’” Basically, it’s a constant fire hose of praise and insults and cries for attention.
“就像是：‘你是个婊子。’‘你很软弱。’‘你没有安全感。’‘我爱你，你能回应一下吗？’”基本上，这是持续不断的赞美、侮辱和呼唤关注。
I asked him if his brain exploded every time he opened the app.
我问他每次打开应用程序时他的大脑是否会爆炸。
“Because I’m a very centered, balanced person,” he said.
“因为我是一个非常专注、平衡的人，”他说。
“I understand why these people are doing this.
“我理解这些人为什么这样做。
If I didn’t understand, then I probably would go crazy.”
如果我不明白的话，我可能会发疯。”
What Durant understands, he explained, is that the people writing to him aren’t actually writing to him.
他解释说，杜兰特明白，写信给他的人实际上并不是在写给他。
Kevin Durant, to them, is just an abstraction, a guy on the TV, a figment of their imaginations.
对他们来说，凯文·杜兰特只是一个抽象的东西，一个电视里的人，一个他们想象中的虚构人物。
So what they are doing is projecting onto him the pain or hatred or longing that they actually feel about real things in their own lives.
所以他们所做的就是将他们对自己生活中真实事物的真实感受的痛苦、仇恨或渴望投射到他身上。
This is why he likes to write back.
这就是他喜欢回信的原因。
He wants to show them that he is an actual human, just like them, with his own fears and hatreds and longings.
他想向他们表明，他是一个真正的人，就像他们一样，有自己的恐惧、仇恨和渴望。
He wants to connect with them on that level.
他想在那个层面上与他们建立联系。
Even the angry ones, he believes, have good hearts.
他相信，即使是愤怒的人也有善良的心。
Hatred, he told me, is just another form of passion, and therefore a sign that you’re really alive.
他告诉我，仇恨只是激情的另一种形式，因此是你还活着的标志。
“I can work with that,” he said.
“我可以处理这个问题，”他说。
“I want to see what’s underneath.”
“我想看看下面是什么。”
“I know I can.
“我知道我可以。
People are naturally emotional when they talk to somebody they feel is on a higher pedestal than them.
当人们与他们认为比自己地位更高的人交谈时，他们自然会情绪化。
I’m trying to say: We equals at the end of the day.
我想说的是：我们最终是平等的。
Once I bring ’em up to that, then they realize what they was doing was childish.”
一旦我让他们意识到这一点，他们就会意识到他们所做的事情很幼稚。”
“Jesus used to do that,” he said.
“耶稣过去常常这么做，”他说。
“He used to go to the worst places, and go find the people who hated him, absolutely hated him.
“他曾经去过最糟糕的地方，去找那些恨他的人，绝对恨他。
Who denied him, never even thought about saying his name.
否认他的人，根本就没有想过说出他的名字。
He went to go holla at them and give them the truth.
他去向他们打招呼，告诉他们真相。
And once they heard the truth they souls changed, and they couldn’t deny it.
一旦他们听到真相，他们的灵魂就改变了，他们无法否认这一点。
So I try to take that approach.”
所以我尝试采取这种方法。”
For a couple of hours, in his corporate headquarters, it felt as if Durant and I were having an in-person D.M.
在杜兰特公司总部的几个小时里，我和杜兰特感觉就像是在进行一场面对面的 D.M. 会议。
exchange.
交换。
He wasn’t just answering my questions.
他不只是回答我的问题。
He was asking me questions too.
他也在问我问题。
And asking himself questions.
并问自己问题。
Durant wondered out loud, for instance, why he has devoted his entire life to basketball.
例如，杜兰特大声地想知道为什么他将一生都奉献给了篮球。
Why does he wake up every morning when he doesn’t want to and force himself through all those compulsive never-ending drills?
为什么他每天早上都会在他不愿意的时候醒来并强迫自己完成所有那些强迫性的永无休止的训练？
What makes him want to grind his every waking moment down into muscle memory, grind it so deep that the rest of us will watch him play, and say: Oh, it’s easy for that guy?
是什么让他想要将自己醒着的每一刻都磨成肌肉记忆，磨得如此之深，以至于我们其他人都会看着他打球，然后说：哦，这对那个家伙来说很容易吗？
Durant thinks about these kinds of questions a lot.
杜兰特经常思考这类问题。
Out in public, when someone asks him, he usually gives the stock answers: I love the game.
在公共场合，当有人问他时，他通常会给出老套的答案：我喜欢这个游戏。
I want to be great.
我想变得伟大。
But now, in this mood, those answers made him laugh.
但现在，在这种心情下，这些答案让他笑了。
“It’s got to be deeper,” he said.
“它必须更深，”他说。
“It’s got to be a different connection.”
“这一定是一种不同的联系。”
One day when Durant was 7, Wanda took him to the Seat Pleasant rec center.
杜兰特 7 岁那年的一天，旺达带他去了西特普莱森特休闲中心。
She did it for much the same reason she used to strap him into a stroller: Maybe basketball could hold him steady, could keep him from bouncing around in the chaos of the world.
她这样做的原因与她过去把他绑在婴儿车上的原因大致相同：也许篮球可以让他保持稳定，可以防止他在世界的混乱中到处乱跳。
Durant remembers entering that gym as a full-on spiritual awakening.
杜兰特记得，进入那间健身房时，他的精神得到了全面的觉醒。
It was as if the gates of heaven opened.
仿佛天堂之门打开了。
Holy light flooding down.
圣光倾泻而下。
Angels singing.
天使在歌唱。
This actually might be the best way to understand Kevin Durant: as a religious figure.
这实际上可能是理解凯文·杜兰特的最佳方式：作为一个宗教人物。
In that gym, almost immediately, he became a sort of basketball monk.
在那个体育馆里，他几乎立刻就成为了一名篮球僧人。
On a basketball court, Kevin Durant finally made sense to himself.
在篮球场上，凯文·杜兰特终于明白了自己的意思。
The game drew on every aspect of his being: the watching, the moving, the thinking, the feeling.
游戏充分利用了他的各个方面：观看、移动、思考、感觉。
It was a deep spiritual channel, a way to align his body and his mind.
这是一条很深的精神通道，一种调整身体和心灵的方式。
Basketball brought him instant mentors, the father figures his daily life lacked: Taras Brown, known as Stink, and Charles Craig, a.k.a.
篮球给他带来了即时的导师，父亲认为他的日常生活所缺少的：塔拉斯·布朗（Taras Brown）（绰号“Stink”）和查尔斯·克雷格（Charles Craig）（又名“臭臭”）。
Big Chucky.
大查基。
The coaches ran Durant through endless, punishing drills — the same few motions, over and over and over.
教练们让杜兰特进行无休止的、惩罚性的训练——同样的几个动作，一遍又一遍。
There were times he broke down crying.
有时他会崩溃地哭泣。
Then they ran him through the drills some more.
然后他们又让他进行了一些练习。
Every evening, the rec center would close for two hours, but instead of leaving, Durant would curl up and nap on an exercise mat on the floor, hidden behind a curtain, then wake up to play more basketball until it was time to go home.
每天晚上，娱乐中心都会关闭两个小时，但杜兰特不会离开，而是蜷缩在地板上的运动垫上打盹，隐藏在窗帘后面，然后醒来打更多的篮球，直到回家的时间。
Nearby in the neighborhood there was a hill, a sudden thrust of elevation, and Durant would go there to sprint, to build up the muscles in his skinny legs, and his coach would tell him to do it 25 times, but then Wanda would say why not 50?
附近有一座小山，突然升起，杜兰特会去那里冲刺，增强他瘦腿的肌肉，他的教练会告诉他做25次，但旺达会说为什么不做50次呢？
And she would sit in her car at the bottom of the hill reading a novel while Durant forced himself up and down, again and again, draining the oxygen from his body, gasping and lightheaded, up and down, and if he looked west he would have seen one dark structure on the horizon, way far out — something in Washington, nearly 10 miles away, too far to see very clearly, but it was big and stone, and I looked it up, and it turns out it was the National Cathedral.
她会坐在山脚下的车里读一本小说，而杜兰特强迫自己上下，一次又一次，耗尽体内的氧气，气喘吁吁，头昏眼花，上下，如果他向西看，他会看到地平线上有一个黑暗的建筑，很远——在华盛顿的某个地方，近10英里远，太远了，看不清楚，但它又大又石头，我抬头一看，原来是国家大教堂。
Even today, when Durant plays basketball, with all the cameras and the tweets and the talking heads and the screaming fans, he feels fully alive, connected to some higher power.
即使在今天，当杜兰特打篮球时，面对着所有的摄像机、推特、说话的头像和尖叫的球迷，他仍然感觉自己充满了活力，与某种更高的力量联系在一起。
The littlest parts of it — listening to his coach during a timeout, talking trash to a fan in the crowd — vibrate with holy energy.
其中最微小的部分——暂停期间听教练的讲话，对人群中的球迷说垃圾话——都充满了神圣的能量。
“The whole world just feels brighter to me,” he told me.
“我感觉整个世界都变得更加光明，”他告诉我。
“That’s how I know it must be something.
“我就是这样知道一定有什么事情的。
It ain’t just a game.
这不仅仅是一场游戏。
Because I seen my whole world change.
因为我看到我的整个世界都变了。
Not necessarily the success, or the money.
不一定是成功，也不一定是金钱。
It’s just like: I’m seeing people differently.” He paused.
就像：我以不同的方式看待人们。”他停了下来。
“God’s got his hand on every court in the world,” he said.
“上帝掌管着世界上的每一个法庭，”他说。
“It’s amazing.
“太棒了。
It makes me emotional, because it’s just like, Damn, I didn’t know the game could make me think that deep, and feel that deep.” Today, two decades later, basketball remains the most stable home Durant has ever known.
这让我很激动，因为这就像，天啊，我不知道这个游戏能让我思考得那么深刻，感受那么深刻。”二十年后的今天，篮球仍然是杜兰特所知道的最稳定的家。
Even his grandmother’s house is gone.
连他祖母的房子都没有了。
It was recently torn down; if you drive there now all you will find is an empty lot at the end of a dead-end street.
它最近被拆除了；如果你现在开车去那里，你会发现死胡同尽头有一块空地。
But Durant still carries it around on his body.
但杜兰特仍然把它带在身上。
He has an image of the house tattooed, very large, on the left side of his torso.
他在躯干左侧纹了一幅非常大的房子图像。
As of this writing, the Brooklyn Nets are crushing the Boston Celtics in the first round of the playoffs.
截至撰写本文时，布鲁克林篮网队正在季后赛首轮击败波士顿凯尔特人队。
The Big 3 are finally together, and so far it is going exactly as planned: Durant is delicately swishing 3s, and James Harden is making defenders question their basic life choices, and Kyrie Irving pulled off such a cheeky series of moves, on one play, that he had to tilt his head and wink afterward, like a rakish old-timey movie star.
三巨头终于在一起了，到目前为止一切都按照计划进行：杜兰特巧妙地投进三分，詹姆斯·哈登让防守者质疑他们的基本生活选择，而凯里·欧文在一场比赛中完成了一系列厚颜无耻的动作，以至于他不得不歪着头眨眼，就像一个潇洒的老电影明星。
And yet, still, the Nets raise all kinds of unanswered questions.
然而，网队仍然提出了各种悬而未决的问题。
How far will they go?
他们会走多远？
Against better opponents, will the three superstars magnify or diminish one another?
面对更强大的对手，三位巨星会互相放大还是互相削弱？
Will they win a championship?
他们会赢得冠军吗？
Two championships?
两个冠军？
If so, which of the Big 3 will win finals M.V.P.?
如果是这样，三巨头中哪一位将赢得总决赛 M.V.P.？
Will Kevin Durant spend the rest of his career in Brooklyn?
凯文·杜兰特会在布鲁克林度过余下的职业生涯吗？
Will any of it make him happy?
这会让他高兴吗？
Durant is tired of all these questions.
杜兰特厌倦了所有这些问题。
And I think I can understand why.
我想我能理解为什么。
These are all just details.
这些都只是细节。
Regardless of the score or the playoff seeding, regardless of the color of the uniform he’s wearing, regardless of what he will be asked on the postgame show or even what happens to be trending on Twitter, Kevin Durant, on a basketball court, is practicing religion.
无论比分或季后赛种子，无论他穿的球衣颜色，无论他在赛后节目中会被问到什么，甚至推特上的趋势是什么，凯文·杜兰特在篮球场上都在践行宗教。
When he is able to play, Durant is both in the action and above it, seeing things on the floor but also from a universe perspective.
当杜兰特能够上场比赛时，他既能在比赛中，又能在比赛之上，看到球场上的事物，同时也从宇宙的角度来看问题。
His mind rises and looks down and watches everything blend, the fans and the uniforms and the coaches, all of it mingling in one big flow, like rivers pouring into a bay.
他的心抬起来，低头看着一切融合在一起，球迷、球衣和教练，所有这些都混合成一股大流，就像河流注入海湾。
Every time Durant shoots, the neurons firing inside him are the same neurons that have been firing since he was a boy — and when they fire he can feel the past and present pulsing as one, the action on this court merging with every other court he’s ever played on, with every court out there in the world, on every continent and in every timeline, and the backspins on all the balls are rotating in perfect synchronicity, and when the shot finally drops through the hoop all the shots drop through together, the whole vast catalog of shots that he or any other player has ever taken and made, all the way back to the very first ball that ever thunked into the bottom of a peach basket.
每当杜兰特投篮时，他体内放电的神经元与他还是个孩子时就一直在放电的神经元一样——当它们放电时，他能感觉到过去和现在连为一体，这个球场上的动作与他曾经打过的所有其他球场融合在一起，与世界上每个球场、每个大陆和每个时间线上的每个球场融为一体，所有球的后旋都在完美同步地旋转，当投篮最终落入篮筐时，所有投篮都会落入篮筐。一起，他或任何其他球员曾经投篮和投篮的全部内容，一直到第一个投进桃篮底部的球。
And still, Kevin Durant’s galaxy brain rises, out of the arena, to heights where whole cities overlap, whole cities and their teams, high enough that everything starts to make sense, all ideas start to cohere, and running on an N.B.A.
尽管如此，凯文·杜兰特的银河大脑仍会升起，走出竞技场，到达整个城市、整个城市及其球队重叠的高度，足够高，一切都开始有意义，所有想法开始凝聚在一起，并在 NBA 上运行。
court is just running up the old hill, and he is sprinting in an official game but also sprinting through drills, and he has been working for so many thousands of hours that soon Aunt Pearl will have to come over to the rec center and bring him a sandwich — and he is already very high but is determined to go higher, all the way to the origin of everything, the place where all points converge, and then if possible higher than that, up to wherever an asteroid comes from.
球场刚刚跑上老山，他在一场正式比赛中冲刺，也在训练中冲刺，他已经工作了数千个小时，很快珀尔阿姨就得来健身中心给他送一个三明治——他已经很高了，但决心走得更高，一直到一切的起源，所有点汇聚的地方，然后如果可能的话，更高，直到小行星来自的地方。
Sam Anderson is a staff writer at the magazine.
萨姆·安德森是该杂志的特约撰稿人。
His most recent cover story was about the last two northern white rhinos on earth.
他最近的封面故事是关于地球上最后两只北方白犀牛的。
Awol Erizku is an Ethiopian-born American artist in Los Angeles whose paintings, photography, sculpture and film employ a wide variety of found materials and highlight an Afrocentric aesthetic.
Awol Erizku 是一位出生于埃塞俄比亚的洛杉矶美国艺术家，他的绘画、摄影、雕塑和电影采用了各种现成材料，突出了非洲中心主义美学。
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the playoff history of the Brooklyn Nets prior to signing Kevin Durant.
本文的早期版本错误地描述了布鲁克林篮网队在签下凯文·杜兰特之前的季后赛历史。
The team made the playoffs in 2019, not two years in a row.
该队在 2019 年打入季后赛，而不是连续两年。
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction.
当我们得知错误时，我们会通过纠正来承认它。
If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com .
如果您发现错误，请通过 nytnews@nytimes.com 告知我们。
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