Photo : Gregory Shamus ( Getty )

Last night, after Kevin Durant’s Achilles seemingly rolled up like a window shade during the Warriors must-win Game 5 against the Toronto Raptors, fans and reporters alike began a wild-eyed search for someone to blame. The question of blame here is complicated and multi-faceted and ultimately impossible to answer without more information from the Warriors or Durant himself, but much of it fell on The Athletic San Francisco editor-in-chief Tim Kawakami, who had published an article last week speculating about Durant’s injury and toughness.


It was a basic column that, while invoking tired ideas about toughness and players putting themselves before the team, mostly just gave voice to the speculation and rumors that had already been swirling around Durant’s absence. Speculation and rumors that the Warriors, by the way, encouraged by creating an information vacuum about what was going on with Durant’s injury.

Anyhow, after Durant crab-meated his Achilles on a routine foot plant and people increasingly started to feel that he had been badly misunderstood and unfairly maligned in the lead-up to the game, they flocked to yell at Kawakami for his column that they evidently felt had contributed in some way to Durant’s freak injury. Kawakami spent the next few hours willingly eating shit:






But he wasn’t done, not quite:


Kawakami wrote a dumb column. Kevin Durant got hurt. Though the former had no effect on the latter, Kawakami responded to the criticism by locking himself in stocks and letting people throw rotten tomatoes at his face for hours. At least he did the Warriors a favor by taking the blame.

Update (3:36 p.m. ET): He might finally be done.


Update (9:50 p.m. ET): Nope!