Sports

Durant among NBA’s greatest

By Jesse Scardina

Posted on Sept. 15, 2010, at 9:02 p.m.

The world stage is quite a place to have your launching off party, just ask Kevin Durant. The latest NBA uber-athlete — equal parts Bob McAdoo, Tracy McGrady and Dirk Nowitzki — just exploded into the NBA mainstream after leading Team USA to their first FIBA World Championship since 1994.

Durant has had NBA geeks drooling since he came into the league in 2007 as the second overall pick. Coming out of Texas, Durant won national player of the year honors as a freshmen, and quickly took the award and his versatility to the pro game.

Drafted by the Seattle Supersonics, Durant went on to win the rookie of the year award. In his second season, the Sonics relocated to Oklahoma City, were renamed the Thunder, and Durant’s franchise was born.

Since the Thunder relocated, their management has done a tremendous job surrounding Durant with talent, and he has since blossomed into a megastar. In just his third NBA season, Durant led the league in scoring at 30.1 points per game.

His latest feat just wrapped up this past week when he took America’s B-squad and almost single-handedly pummeled the rest of the world. Don’t believe me? Here’s the numbers for Team USA from the last three games of the World Championships:

Kevin Durant: 100 points, 35-for-59 shooting (59 percent), 15 3-pointers

Rest of Team USA: 159 points, 57-146 shooting (39 percent), 14 3-pointers

Durant instantly needs to be thrown into the conversation of greatest player in the league.

Right now, that conversation begins and ends with LeBron James. You can always try and make the argument that Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Chris Paul, or Dwight Howard can also be included. But LeBron can produce statistics that resemble each name above; especially with the ridiculous amount of talent he has around him. LeBron cannot produce what Durant provides.

Although Durant might not have the blend of talents of all the players above like LeBron does; he does have his own unique cocktail of unstoppable NBA abilities. The numbers these two athletes could put up in the coming years are incomprehensible. In no time LeBron could be stockpiling triple-doubles as if he were Oscar Robinson in Karl Malone’s body, while Durant scores over 35 a game with shooting percentages of 50-40-90 on field goal, three-point, and free throw shots respectively. The future of the NBA rests with these two super stars.

The NBA could be looking at the don of the Magic vs. Bird rivalry 2.0. There’s not a better Magic impersonator than LeBron, who’s basically a Bruce-Banner-when-he’s-angry-sized version of Johnson. Durant on the other hand, has the shooting touch of an ’86 Bird, with the added athleticism of someone not from French Lick, Ind.

The way they carry themselves even scream polar opposites. While LeBron drove a knife into Cleveland’s back and proceeded to take the easy road for the rest of his career by joining forces with Wade, Durant signed an extension with the team that drafted him, and announced it with a simple tweet.

It seems like a short five years back, when LeBron was blossoming into a superstar, that this was the greatest player we were ever going to see. Now, Durant seems poised and in position to have his name on the list of the greatest of all times, but will he ever surpass LeBron?

Let’s let that decision take longer than an hour to play out.

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