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KD decries media criticism of Kobe: 'They never got players and how we work'
We've known for a while that Kobe Bryant holds a special place in Kevin Durant's heart. After forging a relationship on the Olympic-gold-medal-winning 2012 edition of Team USA, Durant and Bryant became basketball buddies who would exchange wee-hours text messages about how to not just reach the rarefied air that few have ever breathed, but keep climbing even higher.
A year and a half ago, in the midst of an MVP season, Durant called Kobe "the greatest of all time," ranking Bryant and Michael Jordan "1 and 1A" in basketball history in terms of pure skill. Last December, in the wake of a lengthy ESPN feature claiming that Bryant's overwhelming personality, declining production and inability to sublimate had scared top free agents away from the Los Angeles Lakers, Durant swore that stars worth their salt — stars like him — would want to play with "a winner" like Kobe "every single night."
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Durant reveres Bryant the way many 27-year-old basketball obsessives do: as a fan who spent most of his formative years watching Kobe set wing defenders ablaze in pursuit of rings. As such, he hasn't much enjoyed the ongoing media coverage of Bryant's precipitous decline this fall — a breakneck slide down an Everest-steep slope hastened by three consecutive season-ending injuries, which convinced the Mamba to announce Sunday that he will retire at the end of this season.
Durant shared as much with reporters before Monday's game against the Atlanta Hawks, according to Anthony V. Slater of the Oklahoman:
Kobe announced his retirement last night. He's a guy you grew up watching and got to know. What was your first thoughts when you heard this would be it for him?
Kevin Durant: "I did idolize Kobe Bryant. I studied him, wanted to be like him. He was our Michael Jordan. I watched Michael toward the end of his career with the Wizards and I seen that's what Kobe emerged as the guy for us. I've been disappointed this year because you guys (media) treated him like s***. He's a legend and all I hear is about how bad he's playing, how bad he's shooting, time for him to hang it up. You guys treated one of our legends like s*** and I didn't really like it. Hopefully now you can start being nice to him now that he decided to retire after this year. It was sad the way he was getting treated. He had just an amazing career, a guy who changed the game for me as a player mentally and physically. Means so much to the game of basketball. Someone I'm always gonna look to advice for anything. Just a brilliant, brilliant, intelligent man. Sad to see him go. He put his mark on the game."
Durant's remarks immediately came under fire from media folk who noted a couple of things:
• That KD sure seems to have plenty of bones to pick with the media;
• That criticizing the media for criticizing the shooting of a player missing 70 percent of his field goal attempts and 80 percent of his 3-pointers, especially when that player continues to take more shots than any of his teammates, is a tough pill to swallow; and
• That lumping all writers, reporters, commentators, et al., together into one amorphous blob of The Media united in throwing unnecessary shade at Kobe and/or offering insufficient genuflection at his altar suggests either a misunderstanding of or disregard for the role of the people who cover the game.
Wind of that response quickly made its way back to Durant, who expounded on his comments in a follow-up with ESPN.com's Royce Young:
"I understand [the media] have to write about the game. Of course I understand that," Durant told ESPN.com. "Kobe hasn't played well, and his team hasn't played well, but did we expect that from them? [ESPN] did say he was the 93rd-best player in the league, you did have the Lakers as the worst team in the West, but it seems like everybody is happy that he's going out like this. Every game he's played on TV is about how terrible he looks, every article the next day is about how he should retire and give it up. Just killing him.
"I never hear about the Finals MVPs, the accolades. They did it for [former Yankee] Derek Jeter, they will do it for Tim Duncan when he leaves even if he's playing bad. I know you gotta report the games, but you're going too in-depth about how bad he is. You're almost kicking him out the league." [...]
"This game saved my life, this game gave me a new life, this game taught me so much about life," Durant said. "Hell yeah I'm sensitive about everything involving it. I understand not playing well and stuff; that's a part of it. But you can't treat Kobe like he's D'Angelo Russell when it comes to his coverage. Be a little more respectful to what he's brought to the game. Take yourself out of it and think about the game! These media people take it too personal, and when he doesn't play well, it's their turn to kill him because they might not have liked what he said or did. But when you think about this beautiful game first, then all that personal s--- goes out the window when reporting. I think about the game, its players and everything else after that when I speak.
"They say I don't get the media and how they work," Durant said. "Well, they never got players and how we work."
I think ... well, I think there are arguments to be made on both sides of this.
Yes, Kobe's been awful this season, and no shortage of observers have discussed and dissected his struggles. Yes, those who pay attention and recognize the sheer severity of the injuries from which Bryant is trying to return — a ruptured Achilles tendon, a fractured kneecap, a torn-up shoulder — with two decades of NBA ball on his busted wheels expected things to go poorly, if not necessarily this poorly.
Doing what Durant asks — not going as "in-depth about how bad he is," grading Kobe's 2015-16 performance on a curve informed by his 2005-06 performance, approaching it as if this particular version of Kobe isn't a negative on-court presence for this particular version of the Lakers — would mean the media's failing to do its job. Baseball writers wrote harshly about Jeter's declining defensive range and utility before he kicked off his farewell tour, and basketball writers will do the same to Duncan just as soon as he stops playing All-NBA defense while shooting 50 percent from the floor and ranking third on his team in assists. (If that ever happens.)
This isn't about holding Bryant to the same exalted, elevated standard to which he's held himself throughout a surefire first-ballot Hall of Fame career, or expecting him to be the same legend today he was a decade ago. It's about accurately describing what has been, thus far, one of the single worst offensive seasons for a volume shooter that many of us have ever seen. Kobe's True Shooting percentage (which takes into account 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy) of .409 is the sixth-lowest in NBA history for any player who's averaged at least 16 field-goal attempts per game, with the only five worse marks coming in the 1950s. It has been that bad. We have to say so.
That said: even though those arguing against painting the entire media profession with one broad brush are right, it has felt like there's a certain level of glee from some documenting Bryant's downturn — an undertone of "ding-dong, the witch is dead!" as the poster snake of hero-ball's evils goes down in oxygenated-by-airballs flames, a crash landing that just so happens to coincide with Stephen Curry and the move-the-ball-and-we-all-eat Golden State Warriors' ascent to the ranks of the NBA's immortals.
The last five NBA champions — last year's Warriors, the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, the back-to-back Big Three Miami Heat and the 2011 Dirk-led Dallas Mavericks — have won by playing some variation of The Beautiful Game. Now, the last guy to win a ring with isolation rock-fighting (6-for-24: never forget) is on his way out. That's seemed like cause for celebration among some of those who have spent the last half-decade or so railing against the statistically unsound, mathematically indefensible underpinnings of Kobe's game. Like, "We were right all along, and this proves it."
And maybe that is true! (From a pure "this is the way NBA basketball is most successfully played now" standpoint, I'm pretty sure it is.) But while some players get that, and while the number who do may be increasing, a great many just don't see the game that way. To them, maybe the breathless pointing to Effective Field Goal percentages, SportVU contested/uncontested shooting data, clutch-points-produced-per-possession numbers and the like, alongside Zapruder-film breakdowns of bad miss after bad miss and a steady stream of social-media commentary about just how trash and washed and done AF Bryant is feels like piling on. Maybe it feels like unduly burying both a respected peer and a revered hero. Maybe it feels like an unwelcome preview of a worst-case scenario for their own last days that they'd really rather not think about, thank you very much.
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Durant's suggestion that critiques of all-time greats who've fallen down should be softened in deference to their status is off-base. But I don't think he's wrong that "player projected to be bad is very bad" has become an outsized story because of the identity, and polarizing nature, of this player. I also don't think he's wrong that some might be taking a bit more pleasure in watching Bean burn out than they would watching Generic Shooting Guard X suffer the same fate.
Durant wants us to "take [ourselves] out of it and think about the game" when we write about Kobe, to excise our passions and biases — something KD admittedly couldn't do here — before we start typing. We don't always think about the game the same way, though. In this case, that difference and the distance between the two points led Durant to offer some perspective on his emotional response to cold, rational criticism. That doesn't mean his response is bang-on, and it might not mean we "get" how players work now. It might mean we get him a little better, though. That'd be something, at least.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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