There’s perhaps no player in the NBA who can claim to be a better scorer than Kevin Durant. Since he came into the league, his elite shooting combined with his height has made KD an unstoppable force on the court. Although he’s rarely put up massive scoring games of 50 points or more, scoring 30 or more has become routine for Durant in the past decade or so.
The league, in general, has seen a hike in recent years of players scoring a lot more than they used to in the past and while some will claim that it’s because defenses have gotten worse, a lot of it has to do with how offenses have blossomed in the last 10 years. The NBA is all about spacing now, leaving a lot more space for scorers to operate within the paint, and few take those opportunities as KD does. That’s not to say the stars weren’t as good, Durant himself explained how difficult it was to guard Kobe.
Speaking with JJ Redick on the Old Man And The Three podcast, Durant broke down how the league has changed and why it’s simpler to score 30 points in today’s NBA than it was even when he entered the league in 2007.
JJ Redick: “Even in your era, ever since you came into the NBA, how much harder was it to score 30 points in a game than it is now?”
Kevin Durant: “It was so hard to score 30. Back then, you got 2 guys in the paint. And it wasn’t ‘exotic offenses’ like you got now, multiple screens… That was the key play, and that made it seem like you were out of this world, if you ran ‘Floppy.’ But now, you got coaches dedicated to finding trick plays to get you open and get you into space. But back then, it was like you had to create your own space out of nothing.”
KD went on to expound on his take, with him and Redick discussing the death of the ‘Stretch 4’ position in the modern game. As the sport has evolved and analytics have come into the picture, it’s no surprise that all these players are finding the space to score more often than they did even back in the early 2010s.
