Last night in Oklahoma City, Kevin Durant treated basketball fans to what might be the greatest four-point play in NBA history.
Down five with 18.1 seconds left, he inbounded the ball to Russell Westbrook and cut toward the left corner, Memphis’s Tony Allen on him like a conjoined twin. Westbrook floated a pass to him on the run that Allen got a hand on, tipping the ball away from Durant along the sideline. Westbrook chased it down and, falling out of bounds, got the ball past Allen and found Durant in the corner, Marc Gasol closing in on the baseline. Gasol swiped at the ball as Durant pulled it from his hip to his shoulder and fired. Cash. He then hauled himself up from the courtside seats and drilled the free throw for good measure.
Despite that bit of proof that magic exists, the left corner hasn’t been great to Durant over the course of his career. Of his 2,712 total three-point attempts—regular season and playoffs combined—just 61 have come in the left corner. He’s converted 34.4 percent of those looks overall (down from his career average of 37.3) and in the playoffs that number has fallen to 30 percent (including last night). He doesn’t take a ton from the right corner, either—just 111 total—but he’s hit 39.6 percent of those looks overall and 47.1 percent of them in the second season.
The reason the league’s most efficient scorer doesn’t get off a high volume of shots from statisticians’ favourite spot on the floor is pretty simple. The corner three is where you park catch-and-shoot specialists and hope the defence either forgets about them or gets stretched so thin it can’t rotate to them. No defence, no matter how overburdened, is forgetting about Kevin Durant, and they’re certainly doing everything in their power to keep him from an open corner three.
When Durant gets a look along the baseline, more often than not, it’s the Larry Bird kind: screened, double-teamed or otherwise made impossible to all but the most elite scorers. That’s what Memphis gave him, throwing two of the best defenders in the league at him in Allen and Gasol. It just didn’t matter.
Allen actually did one hell of a job on Durant last night, though a look at KD’s line—36 points, 11 boards, four assists, 5-of-12 from downtown—may not make it seem so. Giving up at least six inches in the matchup, he still managed to up the degree of difficulty on every OKC attempt to get the ball into Durant’s hands. He had four steals on the night and, according to this Allen-appreciation, has limited Durant to 9-for-25 shooting when they’re matched up directly in the halfcourt over the first two games of the series. Even the four-point play only happened after Allen deflected and nearly stole an attempted pass to KD.
Though I have no evidence to support the claim, I’m convinced that if he’d been matched up against anyone else in the NBA last night, Durant would’ve gone for 50. Instead, despite KD’s heroics and every bit of momentum swinging OKC’s way heading into the extra frame, Memphis pulled out a 111–105 win. Split heading to Tennessee, this series is shaping up to be a doozy.
BONUS!
Durant wasn’t the only player on OKC to spit in the face of the physical laws of the universe last night. Though the first one didn’t count, seeing these two dunks by Russell Westbrook will allow you to die in peace knowing your life is complete.