With bar set high, Kevin Durant must overcome three major hurdles
The Sonics rookie made a splash in Atlanta last week when his game-winning 3-point shot knocked off the Hawks in double overtime. It was an incredible shot, as you probably saw -- he leaned away to his left to get away from the length of Al Horford while calmly drilling a 25-footer at the buzzer.
The hope was that he could build on that and deliver better results overall. Unfortunately, he's gone in the opposite direction.
In Durant's past two games, he's exhibited the same troubles that have plagued him throughout his rookie season. While he's shown an ability to create shots and his length can be a huge asset at the defensive end, he's shooting a ghastly 37.4 percent and making far too many turnovers.
Thus far his player efficiency rating (PER) is an unimpressive 12.52, a far cry from our expectations for a guy who was supposed to roll to the rookie of the year award.
I come here not to bury the kid -- he's only 19 years old and he's played just 12 NBA games -- but to try to take an objective look at where he's at and what the hurdles are.
From my perspective, there are three major stumbling blocks.
One of them, clearly, is that he has no idea what a good shot is yet. Durant has taken some very questionable heaves early in the shot clock this season, and at times you wonder if he trusts that he'll get the ball back if he gives it up the first time. That's a major reason his shooting percentage is so low -- it's not that he can't score, it's that he hasn't figured out which shots make sense for him.
A subset of the shot selection problem is that Durant is creating almost nothing for his teammates. In fact, among players with at least 250 minutes played, Durant has the worst pure point ratio in the NBA. The worst. (Pure point ratio measures a player's propensity to get assists.) This might be acceptable if his name were Przybilla or Magloire, but as a go-to guy he has to make some rain for the other four guys too.
"I think he's learning on the fly," Sonics coach P.J. Carlesimo said. "It's really hard to play the kind of minutes we're playing Kevin, to ask him to score, which he's used to doing and we don't want to curb that."
At the same time, Carlesimo indicated that he's given his players a lot of rope early in the season while he gets familiar with their skills, but that he'll need to clamp down soon -- using Gregg Popovich's handling of Tony Parker in San Antonio as his prime example.
"At some point soon we have to start saying to guys, 'I don't want you doing that, I do want you doing this,'" Carlesimo said. "They have an opportunity right now to define their roles and show they can do this or that. I'd rather they define that for themselves and then we'll come to a happy medium of what it is.
"For somebody who's good I think you have to give them more rope early and then bring them back. Kevin and Jeff are good, so they're probably getting more rope than most rookies."
Durant's low shooting percentage isn't just a shot selection problem, though. That brings up the second element where he'll have to improve: He's also creating shockingly few easy baskets.
Usually for rookies that's the easiest part -- they can get out for the transition dunks and highlight film plays, but most struggle in the half court. In Durant's case it's been the opposite -- we've hardly seen him at the rim at all.
One could probably pin some of this on his motley crew of point guards -- let's just say the name "Stockton" doesn't come up much when people discuss them -- but Durant also isn't getting much done by himself or on the offensive boards.
Durant told me that the speed and quickness of the game were the biggest differences compared to college, and that's especially true in his case since he's essentially moved from power forward to shooting guard. Playing against smaller, quicker players is perhaps a bigger adjustment than expected, making it difficult for him to get to the basket.
"Just about the same," he said of the defenses the pros use against him compared to college, "but they're just better defenders. Everybody can play defense. They play good help defense too, so that's a big difference as well."
But for me, the biggest shock hasn't been in his shot selection, or his lack of easy baskets, but in a third area that has nothing to do with offense: his paucity of rebounds.
Durant put up huge rebound numbers in his one season at Texas, averaging nearly a board every three minutes. But in the NBA thus far, he's been a total nonfactor. His 6.5 rebound rate is pretty brutal for a player of his size -- several point guards outrank him. And it's not as if Dennis Rodman has been swooping in to steal boards from him either, as the Sonics are below the league average in both offensive and defensive rebound rate.
This one is worrying because rebounding has less to do with concepts and learning than the offensive factors -- it's basically just going to get the ball, and right now Durant isn't. In part, this may be a by-product of his thin frame, one that undoubtedly will fill out as he gets into his 20s and starts pumping iron.
And his coach insists that the numbers will pick up once he gets his sea legs in the league.
"This year, he's gonna put big rebound numbers up for us," Carlesimo said. "We're just throwing so many things at him right now."
Carlesimo's patience is something we all need in evaluating Durant -- something we should have applied before the season began and we were tripping all over ourselves to award him the rookie of the year trophy.
"It's an enormous learning process," Carlesimo said. "Nine games or eight games is nothing … [Some] guys play a year, guys play two years, and you say they've learned now and all of a sudden they blossom in their third year. You're not supposed to figure it out in nine, 10 games."
John Hollinger writes for ESPN Insider. To e-mail him, click here.
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