For whatever reason, I got started reading basketball stories three years old last night. I really don’t know why, but nevertheless, most were pretty fascinating to look over. And if you remember, three years ago, a guy just completed his freshman year at Texas and was just drafted into the NBA. So this Kevin Durant guy was having a number of stories written about him.
A lot of it was the “Oden or Durant?” stuff, which is interesting to see how many people actually favored Durant over Oden (most try and say the consensus was Oden, but a good number of people liked KD), but this one feature in particular from the Austin American-Statesman gave a little peep into the player we see today. One paragraph really stands out:
The coach put him through shooting drills, passing drills and dribbling drills. An AAU official walked in one day and found Durant in the gym, running and dribbling up and down the scuffed-up court with baby-blue three-point lines, making layups. No one else was around. Durant’s grandmother brought supper to him at the activity center. He ate a bite or two, left the plate and sauntered back to the bin of old, smoothed balls. Durant did his homework in the study room, napped behind a curtain in the gym and practiced until past dark. Brown gave Durant a quotation to remember: Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. He made Durant write it 200 times on a piece of notebook paper.
Then if you remember KD’s draft night during his interview with Stuart Scott, he talked about that same quote and hammered home the point: work hard. We know this about Durant now, but it’s more interesting to see how people really knew it about him three years ago. With a lot of players, it’s just lip service to talk about hard work. With KD, it was the truth.
Well, the DT Shirt Summer Vacation Gallery got an overwhelming response from you readers in the form of four total submissions in an attempt to win a free DT shirt. But I’ll accept the blame for that because I didn’t think of it until summer was half over. Next summer we’ll do it again but launch it before Memorial Day.
Daily Thunder reader Grant Wilson of Norman is the winner of the aforementioned DT shirt. The random selection process involved the highly scientific process of me putting numbers one through four on folded small pieces of paper, and Mrs. Patrick James pulling the one that represented Grant out of a Thunder hat. A hearty thanks to the other folks who submitted photos. Grant has opted to wait to claim his prize until the new DT shirts launch sometime soon.
Grant’s winning snapshot came on a vacation he took in July with his wife Meg and her family in Maine at Acadia National Park. Grant, as you can see, was sporting his WHY NOT? playoffs T-shirt as he stood next to his brother-in-law, 10-year-old Ethan. Bonus points (that did not influence his victory, I assure you) for Ethan’s Kevin Durant shirt and especially for the location of the shot: Thunder Hole, a chasm on the coast.
Grant says he’s an avid Thunder fan who has been to a lot of home games, including the team’s not-so-epic first game against Milwaukee in October 2008 and the epic Game 3 playoffs win against the Lakers.
“Best sporting event I’ve ever been to,” he said.
Grant’s an Oklahoma State University grad who holds a University of Oklahoma law degree, which for a lot of people around these parts is either his saving grace or what makes him a traitor. But he contends he only wears OSU orange and Thunder blue when it comes to local sports gear.
So thanks again for those who participated. Check out the other submissions below. Read more…
We’ve all seen the video. Nenad Krstic threw some punches, tossed a chair, then got slapped with a suspension. And in a recent interview with HoopsHype, Krstic says he got what he deserved.
Do you think your punishment after the Greece-Serbia brawl was fair?
NK: I deserved it. But I didn’t deserve the talk in the newspaper. I’m not one person to get in fights on the court, but I was just trying to protect my teammates.
Like you said, you don’t look like a guy that’s going to get involved in fights. What happened to you there?
NK: Nothing. I think everybody who knows me knows that I’m going to have their their back if there is a fight or a problem or anything like that. I always have my teammates’ backs. So there was a fight, I saw my teammate lying down on the court and I tried to help. And they attacked me and whoever attacks me, I’m going to attack him.
You hear that KD? Nenad’s got your back, yo. But despite the fight being ugly and the chair toss certainly embarrassing, the brawl did show exactly that. Krstic will be there for his teammates. And that might be something that comes in handy this season as the entire Thunder roster has a big target on their backs.
People are going to try and rough up the mild mannered Kevin Durant. People are going to push KD, shove KD and maybe even a few will take a cheap shot or two. But if you do, you might just be getting a chair to the face.
Free Darko with more on Durant: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a modesty and restraint to Durant that sets him apart from other superstars. Yet there’s simply no way to look on Durant mid-game and not see something vicious, even tormented, in his eyes. Sometimes, Tim Duncan gets riled in the playoffs; otherwise, he glides along the pathways to victory with a detachment often mistaken for disinterest. That in no way describes what it’s like to watch Kevin Durant play. He possesses all the swagger of his peers, it’s just been sublimated, or shoved deep down inside so it’s even more combustible. Durant isn’t a throwback to some genteel sporting past. But, it should be noted, that past never really existed the way people want it to today.”
Jack McCallum of SI with a pretty outstanding column on Team USA: “There is much roster confusion, too. All over Turkey I’ve been asked, “Where is Kobe Bryant?” for it is Black Mamba’s likeness that is plastered on the billboards advertising the tournament. In the window of the Nike store on Istiklal, one of Istanbul’s main commercial thoroughfares, are displayed two U.S. jerseys: Bryant’s No. 10 and LeBron James’ No. 6. An English-language newspaper in Istanbul did accurately point to the real U.S. star with a Monday headline that read “Durant and Friends Lead U.S. Into Angola Test,” but ran a photo of Chauncey Billups instead of Durant.” Read more…
I hope this Labor Day finds you well. Yes, there were no Bolts for the day, so I hope you were able to somehow figure out how to get through your morning. It was tough for me too.
But as you relax, think about this: Only 21 days until training camp. That’s three weeks. That’s… not very far away. So if you’re not totally in that fired up mode for the 2010-11 season, this Thunder mix should help. It’s probably one of the best ones I’ve seen. And trust me, I spend a lot of time on YouTube.
This week Nick Gibson of SLAM Online returns to give us an on site report of how our Thunder players are holding up in Turkey. We talk Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Nenad Krstic, and about our boy Tibor Pleiss as well as plenty of chatter regarding the FIBA tournament and everyone’s favorite subject Ricky Rubio.
Be sure to check in next week for our live call in show taking place after the gold medal game. Take a minute and subscribe to our new iTunes channel that’s linked, then listen, and then enjoy.
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(Happy college football everybody. Thank you for your support of Daily Thunder. Go your favorite team.)
I’ve always been an NBA 2K fan. But with KD being on the cover of EA Sports’ new game NBA Elite 11, I might have to reconsider. I realize that’s some incredibly stupid reasoning as to why to buy a video game, but when it comes to KD, I do irrational things. And plus, it looks like he had at least a small hand in the production of the game. How can you say no to that?
Yesterday, when I read Tommy Craggs’ column about Kevin Durant I kind of just thought, “Hmm, that’s an interesting take on it. I don’t really agree entirely, but still interesting.” And moved on. I didn’t think much of it.
But then a bunch of people started writing and giving thoughts on it, so here I am a day late about to give a few thoughts of my own. Try and contain your excitement.
It’s true – we don’t really know Kevin Durant. I’ve met him. I’ve talked to him. In all my encounters, nobody seems to more of the real deal than KD. There are countless stories about him out there illustrating how genuine and humble he is. Every media reporter or fan that’s ever talked to or met him has nothing but great things to say. But to Tommy Craggs point, I suppose we don’t really know Kevin Durant. We just know his image. Read more…
Andrew Sharp of SB Nation with a counterpoint to Tommy Craggs: “Durant has shown no signs of wanting to be the biggest celebrity on the planet. He’s fiercely competitive on the court, and deferential among the media. He stayed in Oklahoma City; LeBron left Cleveland. You can debate the merits of hating LeBron James, but it’s hard to quarrel with someone that loves Kevin Durant because he’s not LeBron James. They seem like two very different humans. At least for now. Maybe, as KD’s profile blooms, the added spotlight will reveal shades of his character that none of us had ever imagined. For now, though, Kevin Durant seems to love basketball more than he loves attention, and that’s pretty great.”
Mike Prada of SBN had this to say about it: “Craggs’ point isn’t that we have Durant judged all wrong; it’s that we can’t really judge Durant well in the first place. Loose comparisons to other stars of his era are faulty, because, as Craggs notes, LeBron was once judged positively because he wasn’t Kobe Bryant, and Bryant was judged positively because he wasn’t Allen Iverson. When we write and think about athletes, we have to ask ourselves whether we’re judging them positively on their own merits or on the way they compare to others. If it’s the latter, we have to think about just how accurate we are with these character judgments. It’s too bad that Durant has to be the example used when bringing this subject up, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about it.” Read more…
Is this getting old yet? Yeah, I thought not. Yesterday, Russ threw down this ridiculous reverse lob. And today, he brings you three dunks of the nasty variety.
The past two games, Team USA hasn’t required the services of KD very much and Westbrook has mainly played in mop-up duty. So there’s nothing all that incredible to take from those games. But the U.S. is 5-0 and headed to the knockout phase, set to play Angola.
Tommy Craggs for Slate with an interesting piece on Kevin Durant and his reported humbleness: “Of course, that’s what really matters in an age that judges athletes foremost on the quality of their salesmanship. LeBron packaged himself poorly. Durant has sold himself well, or at least has given of himself so little that the very idea of his reticence could be fashioned into a cudgel against the Very Bad Thing of the day—ego run amok. More than anything, Durant offers the moralists a clean bank shot at LeBron and his cohort. He will remain useful in this role for a time, and then one day he’ll go and do some Very Bad Thing and shatter all our precious illusions. We’ll have no choice but to pick out a new unicorn, a new cardboard idol to worship, and all the while we’ll wonder how we got the last one so wrong. Did we ever know Kevin Durant at all?” Read more…
Did you know: 27 days until Thunder Media Day. It’s going to be here sooner than you think.
Jason Kersey of NewsOK is thinking political about today’s game against Iran: “I’m fully aware that many people watch sports to get away from things like Iran’s nuclear program. But sometimes sports can add intrigue to the big political issues of the day. The Miracle on Ice, anyone? So, apologies all around if you couldn’t care less about the political implications of a United States vs. Iran basketball game. I, on the other hand, find it captivating.” Read more…
