Kevin Durant's Two Imaginary Juggernauts
KD's ankle injury imperils his second *theoretical* NBA champion of the season.
It’s hard to overstate how impactful Kevin Durant can be when he’s on the basketball court. We saw it for years with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and of course when he joined the Golden State Warriors — elevating them to possibly become the most dominant team in NBA history. We saw flashes of it later with the KD/Kyrie Irving Brooklyn Nets, and the briefest of glimpses after Durant’s recent trade to the Phoenix Suns. There’s a reason whichever team KD bounces to tends to immediately be anointed as one of the NBA’s championship favorites.
But the flip side of the KD coin is his snakebit injury history, which found a new entry when he slipped and hurt his ankle in warmups Wednesday night. Although the results of his MRI are still pending as of pub time, there is reportedly concern within the Suns organization that KD might miss the rest of the regular season, potentially halting in its tracks the potential he’d been building with his new team. And while the Suns are in no danger of missing the playoffs, we don’t know how close to 100% KD would be by then, either.
In other words, the incredible 3-game sample of the Suns with Durant might well be all we get to see of that combination at full strength this year. If so, it would combine with the fleeting glance of excellence provided by the Nets to mean that the promise of not one, but two different championship-caliber KD-led squads was wasted in the same season.
As hard as it was to tune out all of the drama surrounding Kyrie and the Nets this season, there’s no denying that the Durant/Irving combo was dynamite in their limited time together — particularly once Irving returned from his 8-game suspension for refusing to disavow an antisemitic documentary he’d previously shared on Twitter. Over the course of the 23 games that Durant and Irving played together during that stretch, before Durant injured his knee in early January, the Nets had an .826 winning percentage (19-4 record) with an offensive rating of 119.0 (after adjusting for schedule strength) and a net rating of +7.0, all of which would have ranked either first or a close second in the NBA over the whole season.
Likewise, in Durant’s tiny dataset as a member of the Suns, Phoenix went 3-0 with an astounding 126.6 adjusted offensive rating and a +12.6 adjusted net efficiency. Although Durant shared both stretches with other talented players (such as Irving, Devin Booker and Chris Paul), he was clearly in command of both teams: He averaged 28.8 PPG with an absurd .701 true shooting percentage, plus 6.9 RPG and 5.2 APG. Small sample sizes aside, either combination would have, in theory, been good enough to be on the short list of championship contenders this season — if not outright favored.
Instead, the superpowered Nets as we knew them evaporated at the trade deadline, with Irving being shipped to Dallas and Durant heading to Phoenix. And now, the dream of KD leading a stacked Suns team to the title is also in doubt, pending how long Durant will be sidelined and how quickly he can return to top form. It’s possible that, by season’s end, both of the most theoretically dominant teams in the NBA will have disappeared without a trace of a championship to show for it.
Filed under: NBA
For sure -- so many grenades being thrown into the middle of what was already a chaotic season. Remember when we all complained the NBA had *too much* certainty a few years ago, during that Warriors-Cavs Finals streak? Those days are gone.
Add Luka's injury and everything going on in Memphis, it's anyone's guess on who's getting a top 6 seed or being subjected to the play-in. It's a wild time in the West.