Kevin Durant And Trae Young Stand With Devin Booker On Being Anti-Double Team In Pickup Games

It’s mid-August, which means the greater NBA community has to argue about the dumbest possible things while basketball is still well over a month away from returning. The topic du jour is whether it’s OK to double team players in an open court run in the summer.

This debate was sparked by a video coming out this week of Devin Booker frustratedly lashed out after being doubled in the corner in a run that also featured Ben Simmons and Joakim Noah, the latter of which explained why doubling is fine. In the wake of this video, people have taken strong stances on being pro or anti-double team in pickup games, and some from around the NBA have chimed in.

On Wednesday, the debate got taken to another level when Trae Young and Gilbert Arenas offered their takes, with Young siding with Booker and Arenas explaining that he should embrace the double team and shoot over by channeling the “#hibachimentality.”

That was only the beginning, as Arenas’ post — which was liked by Dwyane Wade — led to both Booker and Durant hopping in the comments and offering their two cents on the matter, with KD also siding with Booker.

With Durant fully logged on, he decied to take the argument to Twitter, where he sparred with all manner of random people on web.

From there, Andre Iguodala decided to troll Durant some by saying he and Draymond Green doubled Durant aggressively in practice after the All-Star break, making KD very mad.

The etiquette of the pickup game is, at once, fascinating and also an incredibly dumb thing to be a debate taking over the whole league. The two arguments are, essentially, that pickup games are a chance for guys to work on their games, and what guys like KD, Booker, and Young want to work on is 1-on-1 skills in a game environment. However, the other argument is that passing out of a double is, indeed, part of the game and an important one for a superstar. As such, that’s part of what you can work on in the summer, making smart reads out of a double to let your team take advantage — and that, no matter the circumstances, you should always play to win in any game ever.

Part of why the argument is worthless is that neither side is going to give in. Both can make salient points and feel right in their convictions, as such, we’re just going to go in an endless loop and there will not be any overarching “rule” put in place for pickup etiquette. What it should do is maybe spark this as a conversation to be had prior to a game so everyone’s on the same page, although given how this has played out, that might result in no game ever starting.