I was willing to let it ride, but you took minimizing Durant's role to an even more absurd level. To suggest that the other players willfully abandoned their scoring opportunities to focus on defense (or in your words "everything else") so Durant could be the designated scorer is ridiculous. Durant was by far the most consistent and dominant offensive threat on that team, so of course he commanded the majority of the shots because no one else had his touch on the perimeter or finishing ability at the rim. It's not that his teammates couldn't score. It's that they couldn't score LIKE him, meaning in the variety of ways or mismatches he created.
Your explanation that the team's offensive struggles were attributed to "whoever wanted to take the shot if they had a big enough ego" is only a marginal facet. While poor shot selection certainly contributed to bad offense, the overriding reasons the team struggled had more to do with its personnel and their scoring limitations (except Durant), the lack of preparation time needed to create continuity on offense, and most importantly, USA basketball, since the original Dream Team, has always employed a defense-creates-offense strategy to generate scoring...i.e, they rely heavily on turnovers and rushed shots to create offense in transition, negating the need to focus on extensive offensive sets. When they coundn't force turnovers, their offensive efficiency evaporated in the half-court, which explains why they had difficulty getting past teams that took care of the ball and ran good half-court sets.
And BTW, Durant was tied with Odom for the lead in block shots and second only to Iguodala steals, so his defensive contribution deserves more credit also. Whatever bias you have against KD is your business, but don't play it off like he wasn't the anchor on that team. They flat out would not have won the WC without him.
The only thing Durant can do better than everybody else is shoot and make easy dunks. His game is 100% dependent on his finger-tip control. He is NOT anywhere near as skilled offensively as the majority of players in the league but they don't have his finger-tip control.
You can call what I say absurd all you like but last time I checked, I'm the one who can point out everything I'm talking about on game tape.
Defensive statistics (or any kind for that matter) don't mean anything when it comes to playing great defense. Iguodala gets steals because he locks down the guy he's guarding and frustrates him into coughing it up. Durant on the other hand goes for the steal or uses his length to get it. They needed to be on transition because they had a lot of young, inconsistent players.
I have a bias against Durant because I disagree with the bullshit people like ESPN
---. Right. It can't be that I could point out EXACTLY what I'm talking about on the actual game tape. Nope. Definitely not.
The 2010 WC was Durant's international debut celebration. He wasn't on "elite superstar" level with LeBron and Kobe before then, but he sure as heck was after it, and that's because any observer of Team USA at those games knew that his unstoppable play led Team USA to victory.
It's true that other team members enthusiastically played "role player" roles, and that this facilitated his scoring outbursts, but it's also true that nobody else on the Team USA roster could have filled Durant's role and still led Team USA to gold. Other players deferred because he was simply the best player on the roster. The conversation here sounds like "Michael Jordan only won all those MVPs because other Bulls deferred to him." Yes, that's obviously true, and things would have been different if Pippen had selfishly decided that he needed to "get his" more often, for which he deserves credit. But it was also the most sensible thing for to do because it was the clearest path to victory.
I don't think this is debatable. Durant led the team - a well-coached team with fantastic players putting their egos aside to serve the roles they needed to in order to win - to gold. He wasn't just a scorer. He was a defender, a defensive draw, a facilitator, and a clutch player. There's a reason a lot of international observers think Durant is the best player in the world, better than LBJ, even though most American observers wouldn't say so at this point, and it's based on the 2010 WC.
No, it didn't. It contributed to the victory because he played his role, that was made possible ENTIRELY by the unselfish play of other players.
That's not even remotely true. Rudy Gay could've been the scorer or Rose. The only thing Durant was the hands-down best at was shooting. Don't EVER compare Durant to Jordan. Durant could NEVER play in Jordan's era, and he is never going to be even half the player Jordan was. He could never play in the hand-check era when teams knocked Jordan down to the floor harder than anything Durant has ever and will ever experience. Durant is a smarter, better-shooting Tracy McGrady and that is all he will ever be.
Better than LeBron offensively doesn't mean even remotely on Jordan's level. Everything is too easy for Durant for him to ever take the next step. He's often the tallest one on the floor, his finger-tip control is literally perfect which means he can put the ball in from any part of the court, and he's never had to be the lock-down defender or glue that holds his team together. He never will be that guy. His flaws don't get exposed anywhere except the NBA because he doesn't play enough anywhere else. He's more offensively skilled than LeBron but will never be as complete a player as LeBron is. Offensively, Kobe is still the best offensive player in the world and will be until somebody else comes along. Guys like Kobe, Jordan, etc get so good because their shot isn't perfect or because they don't have height advantages. They need to be polished, to be skilled, to be able to do amazing things. All Durant has to do is flip the ball in off his fingers from anywhere on the court or use his physical advantages against his defender. He may turn out to be the best shooter in history and a Top 20 player in history but he'll never be on par with LeBron, Jordan, or even Kobe. He'll do everything they did, all the accolades, the championships, but he'll never be the level of player they are. It's just not who he is. He's not going to improve defensively to that level, not going to be as tough as them, not going to be as offensively polished, and isn't going to be that kind of glue guy that they are.
Well said. Jordan's brilliance, just like Durant's at the 2010 WC is distinguishable from most other superstars because he carried a larger load for his team and yet the team was successful. You see teams all the time that have players who 'carry the team' but oftentimes those teams are not consistently winning because the opposition is able to key in on one player more easily than a team filled with weapons. Players usually become less efficient with their offense (lower FG%, higher TO rate, etc.) when they have more responsibilities on the offensive end, but that simply is not true of the historically great players like Durant and Jordan.
Again, don't ever compare the two. Durant didn't carry the team either.
