21–22 NBA Previews: The Brooklyn Nets (#2)

A word of praise here for the amazing Kevin Durant, a player I love and somehow also never give enough credit. I’ve spilled a lot of ink on this weird, little newsletter blathering away about the importance of unselfishness in basketball, always being careful to point out that I don’t mean unselfishness in the sense of passing a lot, but rather in the sense of doing whatever needs to happen to make the game easier for the people on your team. For all my words about guys like Lonzo Ball and Nikola Jokić, KD is our foremost practitioner of this kind of unselfishness.

Of course, that’s exactly why we give him so much shit. KD wears the unselfishness so differently than most guys. Recently, he seems to have embodied a kind of above-the-fray godliness on the court. With every sentence I write here, I’m resisting the urge to psychoanalyze the dude, to talk about what happened to him in Golden State in the context of some sort of quest for love and acceptance, but the truest thing about KD is the most cliche one. When the basketball is happening, he just plays basketball.

I can’t remember exactly what play it was or I’d pull up the video, but the other night I watched one moment where KD threw the ball out of bounds on a terrible pass. I might be making too much of it, but I was struck at the way he didn’t blame anybody, just quickly and wordlessly ran back on defense. It’s so much more rare than you’d think. More and more there is some curmudgeonly part of me that demands a kind of psychic perfection from basketball players. I want corner 3-point shooters either to crash the offensive glass ferociously or sprint back on defense immediately after the ball leaves their hands. That’s one example. Basically, I want basketball teams to be living, breathing organisms. I want the players to be the organs. I want the self to disappear. 

KD is so interesting to me because he seems, at times, almost to get there. That’s a weird thing to be able to say about a guy who is probably the best isolation scorer in the history of the game. I hated the Nets so much last year. It offended my sensibilities that they assembled this cadre of stars in the dumb milieu of a super-team that wasn’t going to play any defense. I thought the pieces could not make sense, basically. Of course, I didn’t account for Durant’s endless gravity. 

And then all of the sudden he was playing all 48 minutes of playoff games, doing absolutely everything for his team on both ends of the floor, and being so generally awesome that his totally overmatched teammates at times had the opportunity to seem heroic themselves. Think of Bruce Brown raining in floaters and flying around on defense. Think of Jeff Green, of all people, putting up 27 in game 5 against the Bucks on basically nothing but wide open 3s. You know why those 3s were wide open? It wasn’t because of James Harden!

I’m reminded now of KD’s years on the Thunder alongside Russell Westbrook. What a wild pair, right? Durant, the ultimate shapeshifter, and Westbrook, well, just always exactly the shape he is. I wish they’d figured it out together, but I see why they couldn’t. Durant, our ultimate basketball monk, is still out there searching for something, and it’s not numbers or accolades, and it might not even be winning. It’s just a basketball game without any bullshit, and it’s a million times harder to find than you’d think.