Kevin Durant Doesn't Give A Fuck About Graphs
The season hasn’t even started yet and I’m already casting my vote for Kevin Durant as the clear winner of Comeback Player of the Year. Not on the court, because he can barely stand up right now as he rehabs this year. But we are very lucky that the Greatest Tweeter of our generation dropped the burners and went back to tweeting gems. I’m being dead serious, whether talking about drinking Scarlett Johansson’s bathwater or breaking down why analytics forcing bad players to take shots they can’t make, Durant is the best I’ve ever seen on the keypad. That was the only reason I was ever mad at him for having burner accounts, because he was too good behind his own name to ever involve himself in such rubbish.
But this particular conversation is super interesting to me. Because you have a respected basketball writer who very much believes in analytics talking to one of the five greatest offensive players the game has ever seen. Kevin Durant talking about comfort dictating where a player should shoot from as opposed to letting analytics forcing bad players into taking more difficult shots is an incredibly valid point that has been incredibly overlooked for a few years now. The fact that there’s still some huge push back from the analytics community when Kawhi just carried the Raptors shooting mostly mid-range jumpers is wild to me. Everyone in the world knows that three points is more than two. That 30% from three is more efficient than 40% from two. Math isn’t that hard. But we’re not talking math. We’re talking fucking BUCKETS, bro. Get that nerd graph out of Kevin Durant’s face.
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The fact that the analytics community is pushing back DIRECTLY to Kevin Durant’s @s is wild as hell to me. He’s Kevin Fucking Durant. This isn’t a “well he plays the game so he knows more than everyone” argument. This is “hey maybe the most gifted scorer of all time is talking about scoring, let’s all take a moment to hear him out because we could learn a thing or two about a thing or two right now.” Congrats to the mid-range jumper for being brought back from the dead.