It’s fun to imagine the world was different, right? Everybody does it, especially if you follow the news. The American political news, say. For example. Hypothetically.

Ahhhhh Donald Trump should not be in charge of a banana stand and might be the dumbest possible way to destroy the world’s richest nation’s history of liberal democracy, and perhaps the world with it. Phew. Sometimes subtext is better as text. Let’s move on.

Watching the Golden State Warriors play the Houston Rockets in Game 1 of the Western Conference final Monday night was yet another clarifying experience. They are the two best teams in basketball, no matter how much Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens’s Jedi tricks make his presence feel like the addition of an extra superstar in the lineup. Houston was 50-5 this year with James Harden, Chris Paul and Clint Capela in the lineup. The Rockets have smart coaching, an offence designed to hunt weakness and exploit it, shooters and a terrific defence, almost everything you want. Rockets-Warriors is pretty much the NBA final.

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So congratulations to Golden State, because they destroyed Houston 119-106 in Game 1 after an injury-riddled and generally bored 58-win season, and we’ve seen how this movie ends. Golden State won a title, then won 73 games and lost a title in a Game 7, and then added Kevin Durant, who has ruined basketball.

Well, not totally ruined. That’s too simple, and too boring. But the Warriors already had Steph Curry (the greatest shooter of all time and an MVP-winning magical defence-wrecking elf), Draymond Green (a scrotum-kicking offence-wrecking human blank Scrabble tile), and Klay Thompson (the second- or third-greatest shooter of all time, who knows).

Then because ESPN paid all the money that parents ever paid at or on any Disney property to secure NBA television rights, and because the union failed to smooth the infusion of cash into the system, Durant — seven feet of secretly-insecure basketball assassin — signed with Golden State, and ended an era of competitive doubt. He had 37 points Monday.

“Obviously Kevin is the ultimate luxury, because a play can break down and you just throw him the ball, and he can get you a bucket as well as anybody on earth,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr told reporters who were actually there after Golden State’s 119-106 win over Houston. “Kevin, this is why anybody would want him on their team, but you think about a couple years ago when we were in the finals and we couldn’t quite get over the hump. Kevin’s the guy who puts you over the hump. I don’t know what you do to guard him. He can get any shot he wants.”

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Houston is the best result of a year of trying to catch them, and it already feels like they’re dead. Cleveland and LeBron were a killer team last year, and their Game 4 final win was like a mini-championship. It was the only playoff game the Warriors lost.

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The NBA season is a carnival of the absurd: silly, thrilling and hilarious, stuffed with great players, with magical beasts. And underneath it all, that familiar feeling that it doesn’t really matter, because Golden State. They play beautiful, unselfish, whirling-ball-of-blades basketball at both ends, but it’s the fact that they have so many stars that kills you. As the old saying goes, Thompson is Golden State’s fourth-best player and he holds the NBA record for points in a quarter with 37. It’s like Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2014 Olympics, only if they were fun to watch.

But it’s not fun enough, because you never think they’ll lose. It’s the biggest problem with the NBA, that feeling. So it makes you imagine: What if Kevin Durant had stayed in the cursed Sonics-killing graveyard of Oklahoma City? Or gone literally anywhere but Golden State? The NBA has re-engineered its collective agreement to give truly great players huge incentives to stay. In theory, given time, this gives even the Milwaukees and Sacramentos a chance to win.

(Before you say Toronto, look, internally the Raptors admit their championship this year would have been reaching the NBA final. Also, unless he decides on Milwaukee, former Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer appears to be the frontrunner to coach a team that is essentially a great supporting cast in need of a superstar. Maybe he will help.)

Durant could still be secretly resenting Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City. He could be a Boston Celtic, at the nexus of a more organically grown potential superteam. He could be an L.A. Clipper, or a San Antonio Spur.

But he went to the team that gave him the best chance to win, and it took one game to show that after giving the rest of the league a chance to catch up, everything that happens in the NBA still has to be run through the nihilistic filter of: But The Warriors. It’s just not as fun as it could be. Maybe the NBA could have created the most consistently entertaining league in North America without the spectre of a holistic, happy, positive, Steve-Kerr coached, Steve-Nash-consulted, progressive-and-interesting death machine waiting at the end.

Instead, here we are. LeBron only lasted four years in Miami, winning twice and losing twice. Golden State is one LeBron chasedown block and whatever’s left of this season from four titles in a row, and Thompson says he’s willing to take less money to hold it together.

It could have been different, but it’s not. It’s too easy to say Kevin Durant ruined basketball, because it’s only partly true.