Kevin Durant, savior to the Washington football name game

Kevin Durant, who has become a veritable media industry this summer (he crushed a critic on Twitter who mocked his language as a function of his education at Texas by saying, “I dropped out. I had a job opportunity”), shared an idea with Bill Simmons of The Ringer about the troublesome nickname of the Washington franchise in the National Football League.
 
He suggests “Body Snatchers.”
 
And I like it.
 
Not only does it have contemporary music as its base (Rare Essence, 1996, fellow hepcats), it has a bit of historical irony given how cruelly the Native Americans got played in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
 
But Durant, a Maryland kid gone global, also admitted that he preferred the Washington basketball team’s nickname when it was Bullets rather than Wizards, a name deemed problematic because of the high gun-related violence rate in the D.C./Baltimore area in the late ‘90s.
 
As we all know, going back in time typically results in ruining your mental transmission, but we long ago lost the ability to give proper nicknames to our teams, especially in the NBA. The best ones remain throwbacks – Lakers and Knickerbockers and Pistons and Celtics, from the era that also gave us Steam Rollers and Stags and Zephyrs. Indeed, the last cool NBA nickname was SuperSonics (with the second capital “S” for extra pizzazz), before Clay Bennett ruined that by schlepping the team to Oklahoma City and giving it the germane nonsense name “Thunder.”
 
Durant is on to something here. “Raptors,” from the momentary dinosaur craze of two decades ago, is awful, “Heat” was always a miss, and even “Spurs” should probably revert to its original “Chaparrals.”
 
And Warriors? That logo used to be a barefoot and grinning Indian brave dribbling a basketball. No wonder we have a bridge now.
 
As for “Body Snatchers?” Well, it has one great advantage to go along with the difficult sell of making a logo out of two guys with shovels in a graveyard. Even with that, it’s still better than the one they’ve got now. Kevin Durant is our guide and our beacon.