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When Kevin Durant left the Oklahoma City Thunder this week to join the Golden State Warriors -- who have somehow morphed from lovable NBA underdogs into the league's most loathed team --  you knew there would be blowback from former players (especially those without a championship). 

But that's nothing compared to the rage shown by Oklahoma City fans. Some seem ready to disown Durant as a human being. The most bitter among them even burned Durant jerseys in their backyards. 

And here, our story gets interesting by peeling back layers of American society that extend well beyond the NBA. Let's dive in. 

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Verbal snipes from Charles Barkley and the like "range from hollow to hypocritical," as The Sporting News headline Wednesday eloquently put it. Chalk that up to jealousy or just to old-man grumpiness -- but whatever you settle on, it's surface-level.

Before we continue, a quick history lesson: The now Durant-less Thunder were once known as the Seattle SuperSonics. The Sonics were an iconic NBA franchise, with a storied history going back to 1967 and a famous skyline logo. They were beloved in the Pacific Northwest. 

Former Sonics fans, like this one in 2011, are still vocal about their bitterness.Credit: Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Then, in 2006, a group of Oklahoma City businessmen bought the SuperSonics from Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. The NBA approved the sale to the group from Oklahoma with the understanding that the SuperSonics would stay in Seattle. 

A year later, the group from Oklahoma said the SuperSonics needed a new arena. They said Seattle-area taxpayers would need to provide some $500 million in public funding to build this arena. When that proposal stalled, the new ownership group used it as an excuse to move the team to Oklahoma after Durant's rookie year. 

One of those new owners, the late fracking mogul Aubrey McClendon, said in 2007: "But we didn't buy the team to keep it in Seattle; we hoped to come here."

McClendon was fined $250,000 by the league, but his comment crystallized feelings of victimhood in Seattle. 

Billionaires, it appeared, had hoodwinked the common fan of the Pacific Northwest with a slick business move built on lies, power and money. Oklahoma City business magnate Clay Bennet was the face of the shenanigan.

Durant and Golden State star Steph Curry after the 2016 NBA Western Conference Finals.Credit: Andrew Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images

"I realized that Clay Bennett probably bought this basketball team in order to impress his father, father figures, and all of his buddies," SuperSonics fan and acclaimed author Sherman Alexie wrote in 2008. "As angry as I am with the man, I also understand his motivations. At heart, he's a boy who bought the best toy imaginable — a professional basketball team. But like some preschool tyrant, Bennett ripped that toy out of the hands of the kid who had it first."

That was eight years ago. When news of Durant's move to Oklahoma City broke this Monday, Alexie tweeted gleefully. 

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We Sonics fans should organize a parade to celebrate Kevin Durant signing with the Warriors. #SonicsCurse

— Sherman Alexie (@Sherman_Alexie) July 4, 2016

This is why the Oklahoma City fans burning Durant jerseys and trashing his character are so sadly misguided. 

It appears some #FourthofJuly barbecues in Oklahoma got a new addition to the menu.

WATCH: https://t.co/UttyY6uQsF pic.twitter.com/farUMotgpz

— ESPN (@espn) July 4, 2016

Sports foster irrational emotional attachments; it's a big part of what makes them so addictive to so many people. And it hurts when a big star leaves your favorite team -- no denying that. It's fair to criticize Durant in many ways if you're a Thunder fan. Just don't get carried away. Don't forget the bigger picture. 

At the highest levels, professional sports franchises are money-making, vanity-fueling enterprises controlled by a small cabal of billionaires with little regard for the common fan who scrimps and saves for weeks to take his or her family to a game. We've seen evidence of this in places from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., as fans -- which is to say, customers -- get bent over the barrel. 

Meanwhile, players like Durant are simply employees. It's a weird relationship to consider, but such is the bizarro world of pro sports, in which millionaire employees are often pitted against billionaire owners. The numbers distort everything, but at heart what you have is the inherent tension between rich employers who want employees to do as they wish, and less-rich employees who act in their own self-interest. 

It's not like Oklahoma City couldn't have done more to retain Durant's services -- for example, not trading away James Harden in 2012 to avoid the luxury tax. 

This tongue-in-cheek tweet about Durant's move by The Wall Street Journal boils the weirdness down to its practical reality. 

Talented Millennial Accepts High-Paying Job Offer From Innovative Bay Area Company https://t.co/agSo0e7g1e pic.twitter.com/A6oMMxV506

— WSJ Sports (@WSJSports) July 5, 2016

The dynamic gets perverted when you see fans who days ago professed love for a player burning that player's jersey in the streets. It's warped in every way, but it's a dynamic that's actually familiar to the rest of us everyday people. 

Perhaps you've had your travel plans thwarted by an incompetent airline once or twice. Perhaps you've tried to remedy this situation at the customer service desk, but found little help from an employee who isn't permitted to give more than a little help. Perhaps you lose your cool -- which is understandable on a certain level. Perhaps you snap at the airline employee, and it gets personal. 

Now here you are, a wronged customer, getting ugly with this airline employee, a person who in reality has negligible control over the situation. Meanwhile, the real villain -- the airline owners who squeeze profits via overbooked flights and a blasé attitude toward customer experience -- continue stacking bills in their ivory towers. 

Durant drives against the Warriors in last  season's conference finals.Credit: Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images

If we squint through the kaleidoscope at the right angle, we can see the Oklahoma City fans raging against Durant's decision as a bizarro version of this same airline-counter dynamic. 

Ultimately, sports fans are customers and pro athletes are just employees, albeit highly paid ones. Both groups are pawns in the big-money game run by franchise owners. When those owners convince their customers to see their employees as avatars first and people second -- as "chess pieces in a game of live-action fantasy sports, moved by powerful men in board rooms," as The Nation's Dave Zirin wrote this week -- we all lose a bit of our humanity.

It's a ploy business owners across industries have long used to deflect blame and responsibility from their own laps, where it often belongs. But rarely is this laid out so plainly as when a star athlete leaves for another team. 

So if Alexie and other spurned Sonics fans seem gleeful over Durant leaving Oklahoma City, it's not sour grapes. It's a statement of solidarity -- one Thunder fans burning Durant jerseys would be wise to note. 

Sports fans have more in common with one another -- and even with the millionaire employee-athletes they often disparage -- than they do with the billionaire owner class that cloaks its own selfish motives in abstract notions of love and loyalty. 

The disappointment of fans in Oklahoma City this week is understandable and worth acknowledging. But what happened to NBA fans in Seattle almost a decade ago is still the real story. 

April 2008.Credit: Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images

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