By all accounts, the personal bond between Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook was unshakable. But on the court, they couldn’t have been more gloriously mismatched. And for eight years, that was exactly what made them such an enthralling duo.

You couldn’t find two players with a more marked contrast in style. Durant is a lithe, artful sneaky assassin, a streamlined offensive weapon who can dominate a game while almost completely avoiding notice. Westbrook is all rough edges and super-charged hellfire, a human depth-charge whose highlights are ideally suited to a Stooges soundtrack. On some days, they were perfectly complementary. On others, they clashed on a nearly metaphysical level.

No matter how much KD and Russ genuinely cared about each other, watching them play together was often an exercise in unspoken tension. For every bucket that KD smoothly manufactured, Westbrook would do something unconscionable that erased—or should’ve erased—the competitive advantage. And when KD was simply too muted to rouse the Thunder, Russ’s sheer emotion was there to kickstart them. If Kevin Durant was all about the orderly execution of basketball—which is exactly why he’s perfect for the Warriors, by the way—Westbrook’s entire trajectory consisted of smashing the game to pieces and then dancing amid the wreckage.

At times, it worked marvelously. The Thunder made the NBA Finals in 2012 and, had it not been for a seemingly recurring pattern of late-season injuries, probably would have won at least one title during the Russ-KD era. The concentration of talent may not have been quite as vast as, say, the Shaq-Kobe Lakers or The Big Three in Miami, but when both Durant and Westbrook were at their best, few teams had an answer, or even an appropriate response. There was just too much firepower, too many varied forms of attack, too much murder in the open court.

"Even if no one tries to cast this as a break-up, it is, for the simple reason that two players inextricably linked in our minds may now never suit up together again."

But the glaring fact is that KD and Russ simply never looked totally comfortable together. They might as well have existed in parallel basketball universes. The Thunder were often criticized for playing iso-heavy “hero ball”; this was as much a product of Durant and Westbrook’s inconclusiveness as it was Scott Brooks’s lack of imagination or OKC’s persistent lack of depth and shooting. If the two superstars often alternated possessions it was because trying to utilize them in perfect harmony was an impossibly tall order—maybe even a lost cause.

As we close the books on this unlikely and at times awkward pairing, it’s tempting to skew tragic and suggest that they were doomed from the start, that there was simply no way to build a team around two players with diametrically opposed philosophies of basketball. But the hope was never “so crazy it just might work.” This wasn’t even a calculated gamble. It’s a formula that’s all too common in relationships, at least as an initial premise: the steady, steadfast KD was the responsible one holding down the fort, while Westbrook was the free spirit whose energy kept things lively.

Sometimes this dynamic crashes and burns, sometimes it turns into long-term bliss. KD and Russ together could often be unstoppable—but what made them so fascinating to watch was that imminent threat of disaster, as if at any moment one of them might realize their fundamental differences and bring the whole thing crashing down. We spent eight seasons waiting for them to either truly gel or tear the Thunder apart.

Instead, the two thrived uneasily, perhaps incompletely. When Russ missed a large chunk of 2014-15, Durant won the MVP, guiding a crystal-clear OKC team that played exactly to his strengths and ingrained values. In 2014-15, Durant was plagued by injuries; Westbrook unleashed his full fury upon the league, racking up triple-doubles at a historic clip and turning every night into a must-watch exercise in intensity. We never quite marveled at what the two accomplished together because it was so tantalizing to see what each was capable of on his own.

The irony of KD’s departure is that last season was perhaps the closest he and Westbrook ever came to a happy co-existence. Durant continued to get his shots and find his space while Russ continued last year’s rampage largely unabated. The two still didn’t exactly fit together, but through something resembling compromise—Russ toned his game down just a bit and KD embraced stealth like never before—the two seemed to have found a new equilibrium for a team that before had hung in perpetual imbalance. This was no more evident than in the playoffs against the Warriors, where the entire Thunder team was able to come together largely because its superstars found some common ground.