Kevin Durant has accomplished a lot throughout his 10-plus year NBA career. Individually, he’s won Rookie of the Year, and the Most Valuable Player award for the All-Star Game, regular season and NBA Finals. He’s been on the All-NBA 1st team eight times. He’s been an NBA All-Star eight times.
Last year, he finally broke through with his own NBA Championship after making the controversial decision to sign with the Golden State Warriors in the summer of 2016. He’s accomplished almost everything you can accomplish as an NBA player.
The one thing that has eluded him all these years is any sort of trophy or award that would put him among the NBA’s elite as a lock-down defender. To call Durant a defensive liability early on in his career isn’t completely fair, but there was a long stretch of his early Oklahoma City days where he was viewed as a transcendent scorer, and nothing more.
Through hard work and determination, Durant changed that narrative. In an interview with ESPN’s Chris Haynes, Durant opened up about his newfound defensive mindset, how he can still improve, and what he hopes to accomplish moving forward.
Durant told Haynes that his mindset started to shift in 2012-13. In addition to admitting that defense wasn’t even something he used to think about, Durant was very honest about why he wanted to be a good defender in the first place.
“I don’t want my coach to have to pull me out of the game in situations in the fourth quarter because I can’t play defense and then they need to go to a defense-offense [substitution pattern]. I don’t want to be that player. I never wanted to be that player. So that’s what I feared more than anything.”
We all know exactly the type of player Durant is referring to, and it’s refreshing to hear a professional athlete talk about how public perception can change who you are as a player. Substituting defense for offense, and vice versa, is a very common coaching tactic, but at the same time, it’s easy to see why that would get under a player like Durant’s skin.
He’s supposed to be one the best players in the NBA, but if you can’t be trusted with crunch-time defense, how good are you? Despite Durant’s marked defensive improvements, he still has some room to grow.
“I think the only thing holding him back is just the attention to detail on a nightly basis that you see from Andre and Draymond, KD’s length and versatility and speed and ability to close ground is just shocking,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr told Haynes. “And when he’s on his game defensively, it’s amazing to watch. But like a lot of great offensive talents, he might lose focus a little bit and take a possession or two off, and that’s what we try to stay on him about. But he’s been fantastic.”
Durant told ESPN that he’d like to be recognized as an All-NBA defender, and while he’s only 12 games into the 2017-18 NBA season, he’s well on his way towards reaching that goal.
