San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Durant never doubted return to greatness
Kevin Durant deleted the image a while ago. It was from June 12, 2019, the morning he announced on Instagram that he had surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles’ tendon.
He looked somber and vulnerable, resting in a hospital bed with tubes in his nose and wearing a light blue gown in place of a basketball uniform. An IV bag hung in the left corner of the frame. Durant stared into the camera, exhausted, numb.
“I’m hurting deeply,” he wrote beneath the picture, “but I’m OK.”
Later, he made his intentions clear: “It’s going to be a journey, but I’m built for this. I’m a hooper.”
For a superstar, Durant is a wild, random and sometimes childish social media presence, but on that day two years ago, he was real and emotionally accessible. So, of course, he gave that tender memory a digital burial and returned to his @easymoneysniper Instagram persona.
Now look at him, healthy, chipper and chippy, nose to nose with Milwaukee forward
P.J. Tucker, fighting to bring his new team, the Brooklyn Nets, their first NBA title.
It feels silly to have wondered whether Durant could be Durant again. He taunts the silliness, for certain, and you witnessed it after Game 2 of this Nets-Bucks series when TNT reporter Jared Greenberg went probing for moments of doubt during the recovery process.
“Is that a real question?” Durant shot back. “What do you want me to say to that?”
He never questioned his ability to return to greatness. He has been consistent since his Instagram revelation. So the anniversaries don’t mean that much to him. Thursday marked two years since the injury occurred in Toronto during Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals. Saturday marked two years since the operation. However, Durant is only focused on staying in the moment.
It’s hard to picture a world in which he’s not KD, the fluid and efficient scorer of historical significance and one of the most versatile forces the game has ever seen. It’s remarkable that, after missing all of last season to rehab and playing only 35 of the 72 regular-season games this season, Durant is so smooth. Almost nothing has changed for him, except that he wears No. 7 and represents Brooklyn.
“Yeah, it’s really hard to tell the difference,” Nets coach Steve Nash said. “He’s not only executing at that level, but he’s able to play the minutes and able to sustain such a high level of efficiency. So it’s hard to say that he has any dip at this point. And his game has picked up as we go.
“He’s gotten more reps, more comfort, especially defensively and on the boards. And some of the things that when you’re a player that hasn’t played for a long time and you’re a scorer like that, you’re going to focus on trying to get that back first. So he did that, and then he started to pick up the other parts of his game. So it’s very difficult to distinguish him now opposed to before the surgery.”
In the WNBA, Breanna Stewart set a new modern standard for how basketball players can come back from this scary injury. She missed the entire 2019 season, then returned a year ago and led the Seattle Storm to a title for the second time in three years. But she was 24 when she felt her Achilles pop. She’s 26 now, and she has been able to maintain her high level of performance while resuming a normal heavy workload with her commitments to the Storm, USA Basketball and her team in Russia, UMMC Ekaterinburg.
Durant is six years older than Stewart, and he has a lengthy history of lower-leg injuries.
Many of them have been softtissue problems, including a hamstring strain this season that cost him about two months. He’s not the load management type, but Durant may be unable to match his early-career durability now. He figures to try, and that warrants monitoring with the Nets expected to make deep playoff runs for the next several seasons. Injuries have already cost Durant more than two of his 14 NBA seasons, but he’s 23,883 points, two championships and four Finals appearances into a Hall of Fame-bound career. He doesn’t have much to prove in January or February anymore. If a reduced workload helps him endure, so be it.
In those 35 games this year, Durant shot 53.7 percent overall (tying a career-high) and made an insane 45 percent of his 3pointers. So far in the 2021 playoffs, he’s averaging 31.8 points per game with a shooting slash of .524/.478/.903.
This current status is definitely something new for Durant. When he won his two championships with Golden State, he was the Finals MVP, but he was on the court with a comparable icon in Steph Curry, and the Warriors were staring down LeBron James, the face of the league. James is at home now. Curry is, too. Durant is the dominant story line, and true to him, it’s a tale of beautiful basketball, not celebrity.
To understand Durant, look at him not purely as a basketball player or an entertainer, but as a temperamental artist trying to perfect his craft. He loves the artistry of basketball. He loves talking about Michael Jordan as a pure shooter rather than just as a scorer. He marvels at the intricacies of hesitation dribble moves. He spent 18 months out of the spotlight and used it to re-create his body and his game, step by step, exercise by exercise, until he had deleted any sense of limitation.
When Durant is engaged, when he is in the moment, there is no better player. Staying in that place has been a challenge, and it always will be. He’s there now, though.