Kevin Durant: Not Your Average Superstar

It was the 2006-2007 season and my beloved Celtics were in the midst of one of their worst seasons ever.  They ended the season with an abysmal record of 24-58, including a record breaking 18-game losing streak. The Celtics had a good shot of getting one of the top 2 picks in the 2007 NBA draft.  So I spent most of that season watching college basketball looking to find out more about the top 2 prospects. One of these prospects was a frail old man, who was posing as a 7 foot college freshman at Ohio State, and the other was this skinny kid from Texas who could definitely play some basketball. As it turned out, the Celtics ended up with the 5^th overall pick which they traded for an NBA Championship instead of drafting Yi Jianlian.

Old man Ohio was picked first and with the second overall pick the now defunct Seattle Supersonics chose the skinny kid from Texas, SF Kevin Durant. Durant then went on to average 20.3 points per game on his way to winning the Rookie of the Year award. In his 2 years since receiving the award, and the team moving to Oklahoma City, he has only gotten better.  This past season Durant was named the NBA Scoring Champion by averaging 30.1 points per game, scoring 200+ more points than the second place LeBron James. To go along with his scoring title he was also selected to the NBA All-Star team, was named to the All-NBA First Team, and took his very young Oklahoma City Thunder to the playoffs and forced the vaunted LA Lakers to 7 games in only his 3^rd season.

So here you have this player who, judging by his talent, skill, stats and accolades, is a bona-fide superstar in the NBA. But, you wouldn’t know it. You wouldn’t know it mainly because he doesn’t let you know it. For whatever reason this 21-year old millionaire, who is one of the best basketball players in the world, just gets it. It seems as if he understands he doesn’t have to promote himself in order to be a great player, even in today’s “superstar” driven NBA.

On July 7^th Durant signed a 5-year extension to STAY IN OKLAHOMA CITY. Yes, he decided to stay in Oklahoma, got to give him credit for sticking with his team because I know I wouldn’t want to stay in Oklahoma for 5 minutes, never mind 5 years. He made this announcement not by a big press conference, or an hour long special but by a post on his twitter account.

"Exstension for 5 more years wit the #thunder....God Is Great, me and my family came a long way...I love yall man forreal, this a blessing!"

True, it is not the most elegant thing to ever be written but it’s simple, tasteful, and seemingly heartfelt and believe it or not he did not write in the third person. 

One day later on July 8th, a caricature of almost all that is wrong with young professional athletes gets ESPN to have an hour long shameless self-promotion to let the world know where LeBron James is ‘taking his talents’. During this insufferable hour of hot air presented by Vitamin Water the world also got to hear other selfless comments like “LeBron James has to do what’s best for LeBron James” and how he has “done a lot for the city and people of Cleveland.” 

Non-sense like this just makes me appreciate players like Kevin Durant that much more. What LeBron decided deserved an hour long primetime special, Durant did in 140-characters or less. An athlete showing any semblance of humility goes a long way, because it really is a rarity in today’s pro sports.  So I, for one, will continue to cheer for the uncommon, players like the not-self-proclaimed “Durantula” who seem to just do it right.