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Can you make an argument that Kevin Durant was the best player of his team in every season of his NBA career? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Beautiful_Ad55@alien.top to c/nba@nba.space

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Obviously, a season like 2014/15 doesn’t count, where he was out injured almost the whole season.

Durant joined the SuperSonics in 2007, averaging 20 PPG in his rookie season. He then played for OKC for many years together with Westbrook and Harden. Then he went to Golden State, playing with Curry and Thompson. After that, he joined the Brooklyn Nets and played with James Harden and Kyrie Irving. Lately, he joined the Suns with Devin Booker.

So I would say there are not many players in NBA history who had more star teammates over the years than KD. Can you still say that KD always was the #1 guy at the end of the day? Especially when it goes to the clutch time?

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[–] JadedButWicked@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The warriors were always better with lineups featuring Curry and no Durant than vice versa even during the three years KD was on the team.

Because Curry's backups sucked and were out of the league and when KD was out they had Klay and Draymond step up to replace him.

[–] Puzzled-Bet4837@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I really don’t think that was the reason. KD was playing with Klay and Draymond too it’s not like those guys were coming in for him. I think Steph really elevates the other guys around him (including KD) better which is why the team as a whole played better with him.

Here is a video that gets into some more of the film and numbers. To summarize the video; defenses were always much more keyed in on Curry, KD had significantly more efficient scoring efforts when he played with curry than without but Curry was mostly the same with or without, warriors were +2.4 if KD played without Curry vs +12 if Curry played without KD, and +15 if they both played so obviously better but the real driver to their success is curry.