There have been some pretty exciting eureka moments in human history. Sir Isaac Newton getting dinged by that apple and discovering gravity, Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a lightning storm to figure out electricity, Chris Ford hucking the first 3-pointer, but they all pale in comparison to two Phoenix Suns fans.
After the Twitter account SunsUniTracker posted a mockup Kevin Durant jersey when the current-but-soon-to-be-former Net requested a trade, kicking off the true fury of free agency NBA fans lust after like demons for blood, Suns fans got to work. To be fair, Phoenix had yet to re-sign Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton is still is assumed to be leaving the team, so the franchise’s fanbase being a little riled up was warranted.
The first attempt at real-world application of invention, in this case, saw a simple, crude cross out of an old Dragan Bender jersey (kudos to the owner of this artifact, and to Bender, wherever he is, because the Dragan really never leaves his body) that replaced BENDER with DURANT, over the number 35. Replies were generally encouraging until Ed Ongaigui replied with the bolt of clairvoyance the exercise needed.
ke-BEN-DER-ant ?
— Ed Ongaigui (@Ongai) June 30, 2022
Lo, the collaboration of the century was born.
There we go pic.twitter.com/yNqVsBnobD
— Connor Witt (@ConnorWitt) June 30, 2022
Like the aforementioned eureka moments, there are some pretty important inventions that came from duos. There’s flight as we know it (and by extension, John Collins’ airplane dunk in 2019’s Dunk Contest) from the Wright Brothers, Drs. James Watson and Francis Crick figuring out DNA, Ben & Jerry, and, the very conduit for this fertile collaborative ground, the internet, invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Anyway, this tops them all.
What I like to picture, and also did myself the first time I saw this and finally stopped laughing, is Mr. Witt softly mumbling “Keb-en Der-ant” to himself, many times, as he used the markup feature on his phone to trace, with a trembling finger, the letters to this masterpiece.
While it’s still unclear where Durant is going to end up after spending a single season in Brooklyn playing for the super team he helped to create (hey, Dr. Frankenstein was not all that thrilled about his monster, some ideas are better let on the table), at least in the ongoing chaos of NBA free agency we were given a masterpiece: Keben Derant.