26 year-old Kevin Durant, already established as one of the greatest basketball players the game has ever seen, is finally comfortable in his own skin. The reigning MVP and four-time scoring champion made that clear in an illuminative, wide-ranging interview with Sam Amick of USA Today. Absent from the piece are platitudes, generalities, and typical company lines that Durant so frequently espoused as he grew to super-duper-stardom since being drafted in 2007. In their place are moments of real, unfiltered insight, like Durant’s admission of the profane thoughts he had for those who criticized his decision to withdraw from FIBA World Cup play this summer.
Durant doesn’t mince words anymore, and its evident in his talk with Amick that he would respond differently to last spring’s “Mr. Unreliable” headline today than he did at the time. Saying how offended he was by that pointed assertion, Durant evoked legendary names to shed light on his competitiveness and proverbial “killer instinct.”
“What I heard was that people would talk about me and say that I don’t have that killer dog in me, like a Kobe (Bryant) or — who else? — like Mike (Jordan), and those guys have,” he continues. “But I’m like, ‘I wouldn’t be able to survive this long in this league doing the stuff that I do at an elite level (if he didn’t have it). I wouldn’t be able to do it for seven straight years if I didn’t have that it,you know?’
“And sometimes that may not equate to wins, or championships every year. (But) I feel as though I’m always consistent with what I do. I put in the work. And being the best player (in the NBA) is (now) a conversation. If you go out today and say, ‘KD is the best player in the world,’ that’s a conversation. That’s not the tell-all, be-all. So when people say, ‘Oh, he might have been MVP, but he’s not the best player in the world.’ Well, I can argue it. We can all argue it.”
The notion that KD lacks the will of the truly transcendent players is ridiculous. Since his days at the University of Texas, it’s been obvious to us that he is wired similarly to guys like Jordan and Bryant. We specifically remember a time when a freshman Durant slapped teammate Connor Atchley, an upperclassman, on the head for passing up an open shot. That’s emblematic of an inherent drive that can’t be fostered – you’re either born with it or you aren’t, and Durant was.
On a broader level, that KD even feels the need to insist he has the mentality of Jordan and Bryant suggests a bigger, generational issue. A certain subset of NBA fans will always believe His Airness and The Black Mamba occupy a higher basketball air because of their refusal – there are examples otherwise, but you get the point – to give up the ball in crunch-time, sometimes to the detriment of their teams. But new understanding helped gleaned from advanced statistics and the supreme influence of a pass-first great like LeBron James has rendered that line of thinking wildly outdated. The best shot, in almost any case, is the open one.
Durant knows that, and arguably does a better job than any player in basketball of toeing the line between selfish assassin and selfless passer down the stretch. And even more than offseason training or in-game effort, that Jordan and Bryant most often played the former role is the attitude to which Durant is referring when talking about “the killer dog” within them. But that’s not the surest means to winning despite the career highlights and exalted reputations it can produce.
In a way, then, it’s a testament to KD’s mental aptitude for the game that his instinct was ever questioned at all. Either way, good for Durant for admitting it bothered him.
What do you think?
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