There are a few things that aren’t polite to discuss publicly. Religion is probably still a no-go. Coveting another man’s wife? Not a good idea, generally.
And—at least in a basketball context—suggesting that anyone is or might be better at anything than Michael Jordan remains taboo.
Still, I can’t help it. I think Kevin Durant is going to be better at scoring the basketball than Michael Jordan. I think Kevin Durant—if he’s not already—will be the best offensive player who has ever played.
I thought that before he scored 51 points including a 28-footer with less than two second left to down the Toronto Raptors in double-overtime Friday, but it didn’t hurt the argument.
Jordan’s six championships are typically argument enders. Jordan’s statistical achievements (third in total points, highest scoring average of all time) are so mountainous that scaling them is difficult enough. And then you do all that work to get close enough to consider a summit attempt and boom—those rings come crashing down on you like a blizzard on Everest.
We’ll put the rings aside for just this moment so that, on the occasion of Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Friday night visit to the Air Canada Centre, we can discuss the possibility that the Slim Reaper (more on that later) might eventually be the greatest score in NBA history. Better than Michael, better than Wilt, better than Kareem, better than Karl Malone (second to Kareem on the all-time list, and ahead of Michael) and Kobe Bryant (the leading active scorer and fourth all-time).
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 38,387 points in his career, which spanned 20 seasons. Durant’s career average is 27.3 (and climbing) and he’s played an average of 79 games in his career. At those rates he could catch Abdul-Jabbar in a decade.
I’m not the only person who thinks so.
“I think he certainly has the talent [to be the all-time leading scorer],” Abdul-Jabbar told The Oklahoman last season. “It all depends on if he stays healthy and is the focus of the offence, because he can score from anywhere on the court.”
Durant isn’t in his prime yet and he’s doing things that are almost without precedent. Combine that with the fact he’s six-foot-10 with a wingspan of seven-foot-four, seemingly of impeccable character (he doesn’t like the Slim Reaper nickname that popped up this year because it’s “too dark”; and he loves the quiet life in OKC, one of the smallest markets in the league), and it’s hard to see him not being at his best for at least the next decade or so.
Durant comes to tonight’s game against the Raptors having scored 25 or more points in 33 straight games. The only player to manage a longer streak since 1964–65 was Jordan, who went 40 straight during his epic 1986–87 season.
Durant understands the difference between scoring and winning, but he appreciates the company he’s keeping.
“I’m comfortable with it, I’m comfortable with it," he says with a laugh when asked about having his name attached to Jordan’s so much lately. "But Jordan has done way more that score 25 points in however many games. He’s a champion, MVP, Finals MVP — he’s done it all so I’d rather be in that conversation with him, but it’s an honour to be in the same conversation as Michael Jordan. You never want to take it for granted but I have bigger goals in mind.”
"I didn’t want to just make it here, I wanted to have a huge impact," he says. "That’s what I planned on ever since I was eight years old.”
Durant will easily win his fourth scoring title this season—no one will touch his average of 31.9 points a game. Given the fact that he’s just 25 years old and is having the best season of his career, it doesn’t seem risky at all to project Durant challenging Jordan’s all-time record of 10 scoring titles.
See, it’s not crazy to project things on Durant, not just because he’s already great, but because he’s still improving. He’s better, younger, than almost anyone has ever been.
Last season he became one of just seven players in NBA history to join the 50/40/90 club—shooting 50 percent from the floor, 40 percent from three and 90 percent from the line. But here’s the catch: The only other player to meet those standards while scoring at least 28 points per game was Larry Bird, and Bird did it when he was in 29 and 30. Durant did it when he was 24. No one has matched the volume with which Durant scores or the efficiency with which he does it.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate Durant isn’t for what he is, but to imagine what he could become.
He’s already improved by almost every possible offensive measure. As an NBA rookie he shot just 29 percent from the three-point line; this will be his second season shooting over 40 percent. Durant used to be a high turnover player who wasn’t particularly good at helping others score. He’s always had the ball in his hands a lot, but in his second season in the league, only 13.5 percent of his possessions ended with an assist for a teammate. This season his usage rate is at a career-high 32.7 percent, but his assist percentage has doubled since early in his career, to 26.9 percent.
Durant’s decision-making early in his career is one reason Dwane Casey could boast some measure of success against the just-emerging star back when the Raptors head coach was an assistant with the Dallas Mavericks. In nine career regular season games against the Mavericks, Durant shot just 41.6 percent while Casey was there, and when the Mavericks won the 2011 NBA title they swept Durant and the Thunder in the Western Conference finals.
“Shawn Marion was responsible for that, and at the end of games we’d put Jason Kidd on him, he knew how to play and had old man strength,” says Casey. “We had a of different schemes and doubled a lot, but a lot of it was Shawn and J-Kidd.
“We used to beat him up physically and J-Kidd would get away with murder because the officials would let him be physical with him and he was a young kid.”
Casey’s not particularly optimistic that those results can be duplicated tonight, although the Raptors did hold Durant to 5-of-16 shooting when they upset OKC on the road in December.
“He’s evolved a lot. We’d throw different coverages at him from different areas of the floor but I think he’s seen everything since then.”
I ask Casey if it was sacrilege to talk about Durant in the same breath as Jordan or some of the game’s other elite scorers.
“I can see that. First of all, he’s always open,” he says. “He just moves back further and further and further and further. You say pick him up and he’ll take another step back. You can’t guard it and he’s so long, when he gets it up there so high you can’t touch him.”
Not now, and certainly not in the foreseeable future. Michael Jordan and the rest of best in NBA history lookout, Durant is coming.
