Kevin Durant: The most difficult player to defend

Kevin Durant is a unicorn of all sorts. He's nearly 7ft tall, but if you look at the way he plays the game of basketball, you would think he is a guard.

It's his ability to take defenders off the dribble, his ability to take it hard to the rim and his ability to pull up from anywhere on the floor that makes him so unstoppable when it comes to scoring the ball. When you see him get to his sweet spot in the mid-range, you might as well just start heading back on defense because there's no way that the ball is not going through the hoop.

With an MVP, two Finals MVPs, and four scoring titles, among other accomplishments under his belt, Durant is easily a lock for the Hall of Fame when his playing career concludes, but if he can get one or two more rings to close out his career, then we can start to see his name enter the conversation as one of the five or ten best players to ever touch a basketball.

Durant missed 21 games straight due to a sprained MCL injury, but before the injury, he was carrying the Brooklyn Nets on his back with Kyrie Irving being unavailable for the vast majority of those games and James Harden not looking like the same player before he was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers.

Durant's otherworldly play covered up many of those underlying issues within the Nets organization, however, as he was averaging nearly 30 points per game on well over 50 percent shooting from the field. That's hard to even accomplish in a game of 2K!

His best moment in a Nets uniform thus far has to be when he went off for 49 points, 17 rebounds, and ten assists against the Milwaukee Bucks during the 2020-21 Eastern Conference Semifinals, where he helped carry the Nets - with a hobbled Harden and without Irving - to a victory that put them one game away from advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Unfortunately for them, the Bucks were able to take the next two games, but if KD's huge foot didn't touch the line at the end of regulation in Game 7 of that series, then the Bucks would not have gone on to win the championship that season. It likely would've been the Nets.

Things have gone anything but smooth since Durant landed in Brooklyn, but he has that rare ability to carry a team all the way to a championship.

If KD can ultimately lead this organization to their first-ever championship, then it'll be time to erase the narrative that he quit the Oklahoma City Thunder to join the Golden State Warriors for two easy rings.

Winning a ring is never easy, and KD more than pulled his weight to help the Warriors get those two championships.

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