Back in 2014, famously tweeted that UConn point guard Shabazz Napier was his “,” doubling down on the tweet he’d fired out a few months earlier, as Napier was leading Connecticut to a national title, saying there’s “no way you take another point guard in the draft before Napier.”
At the time, LeBron hadn’t announced his decision to leave Miami to go back to Cleveland, and the , likely as an effort to convince LeBron to stay, traded for Napier on draft night to give LeBron his guy. LeBron took off back to Cleveland anyway.
But that’s not really the point here. The point is that great players do not make great general managers. They all believe they know best what makes a great player, and by extension, a great team. But LeBron (who was also a driving force behind the failed experiment that was to the ) falling in love with Napier (who wound up starting 55 games over six forgettable seasons before washing out to Europe) is one of the more memorable examples of why you should always take a great player’s talent evaluations with a grain of salt.
Which brings us to . The current Rockets star recently, hilariously, lumped the 2026-27 into the same talent tier as his 2016-17 . There was more than one ridiculous part of Durant’s assertion, in fact. We’ll get to them both. Let’s dive in.
It all started when Durant was asked this month whether the 76ers, who of course just added and LeBron to go alongside , and V.J. Edgecombe, should be considered a championship contender. To which he responded: “For sure. … Hell yeah, I think they’re going to be a contender.”
This is not a controversial statement. Anyone with a functional pair of basketball eyes should be able to see this. It doesn’t mean they’re going to win the title. They probably won’t. But they’re a contender. They’re stacked. No question about it.
Where Durant loses credibility is in his rationale for labeling the Sixers a contender. “Last time they put three 20-point scorers on a team, they said it was unfair, which was the team I was on. [The 76ers] got four 25-point scorers.”
Kevin Durant on LeBron James’s 76ers: “The last time they put three 20-point scorers on a team, they said it was unfair, which was the [Warriors] team I was on. They have got four 25-point scorers on this team. So, hell yeah, I think they’re going to be a contender.”
Durant was referring to the 2016-17 Warriors when he said “the last time they put three 20-point scorers on a team they said it was unfair,” which is funny because Durant has been on two teams since those Warriors that included three 20-point scorers.
The most recent was the 2023-24 with Durant, and . Before that, it was the with Durant, and . Nobody was calling those teams unfair. The Suns never got past the first round with Durant. The Nets — though we never got to see them collectively healthy in the playoffs, to be fair — never made it past the second round.
That’s largely because you cannot judge the collective merit of a basketball team by the sum of its individual scoring parts. Durant mentions nothing about defense. Or versatility. Or depth. Or passing. Or rebounding. Or offensive fit. Only that the 76ers have a bunch of great scorers, just as his Suns did.
It’s not the first time that Durant has proclaimed scoring to be disproportionately more valuable than any other skill in basketball. In Netflix’s Starting 5, Durant flat-out said anyone can play defense, calling moving your feet left and right “easy,” but it’s “making shots” that wins championships.
Kevin Durant believes offense wins Championships
“You have to score baskets if you want to win a championship… Playing defense, we can get any of y’all in here to bend your legs… that’s easy.”
(Via , h/t )
Durant is hilariously wrong about this. Of course, scoring matters. And having multiple scorers, particularly those who can self-create, obviously gives you a leg up. But there are diminishing returns on scoring alone. The Sixers will definitely suffer from this fact if they don’t figure out all the other things Durant fails to mention.
This is why putting these 76ers in the same historic breath as the dynastic Warriors, who had a bunch of great scorers who fit together inside a system designed for the betterment of the team in addition to an elite defense, great depth and top-end coaching, is ridiculous. But Durant apparently believes basketball is as simple as the individual talent a team comprises (his time with the Suns apparently taught him nothing), and he believes — again, ridiculously — that these 76ers have more talent than his Warriors.
Which brings us to …
As the clip of Durant comparing these Sixers to his Warriors made the social media rounds, a fan wrote in the comment section: “Ain’t close.” Durant fired back with the following response.
“Ain’t close lmao,” Durant wrote. “Joel [Embiid], MVP recently. Jaylen Brown, recent Finals MVP. Tyrese Maxey, All-Star the last three years. We all know what [Le]Bron does. , never a MVP candidate in nothing, 22 [points per game]. Draymond [Green], 14 PPG, 7 rebounds, 6 assists. Steph [Curry] a MVP just like Joel was. I don’t get how the Warriors team is better on paper.”
Again, there is so much nonsense in this comment that it’s hard to single out any one thing. But we’ll start with the “never a MVP candidate in nothing” Klay Thompson stray. For Durant to reduce his former teammate, who without question will be going into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, down to a mere 22 PPG scorer, with no mention whatsoever of his elite defense, movement, or the fact that those 22 points were scored without his needing to control the ball, is an absolute insult, and Thompson was right to take exception.
Klay Thompson didn’t appreciate KD’s comment on Instagram 👀
“Aye man, u good?”
This isn’t to suggest there is any real beef between Thompson and Durant. Who cares if there is, to be honest. They could be having a laugh about it right now. Durant could be full-on trolling. Frankly, this is such a terrible basketball take that it would make more sense if he was.
But taken at face value, once again it appears that Durant only knows how to, or only cares to, value basketball players and teams through an offensive, and to a large degree, scoring prism. He categorized the same way, presenting his most traditional box-score stats as if they in any way encapsulate his impact. No mention of his being literally one of the best defenders to ever play and, in many ways, the quarterback of the Warriors’ all-time offense.
If strays are just going to be fired all over, then here’s one for Durant: Green meant far more to Golden State’s success than Durant ever did. For all of Durant’s résumé-based evidence (the MVPs and Finals MVPs and the PPG obsession with, conveniently, no mention of Draymond’s All-Defense nods and DPOY), the simple truth is this: Take Durant off those teams, and the Warriors were still a championship team, as proven in 2015 and 2022. Take Green off, and there’s a real case to be made the Warriors don’t win a single title.
The variety of impact Green provided, along with (no mention of him in any capacity), turned what would’ve been a far more homogenous team full of shooters and scorers into a multi-layered monster. We’ll see if Brown turns his focus to defense and Maxey maximizes his potential off-ball impact to turn the Sixers into something more than the sum of their individual parts, but even if those things happen, these Sixers will never be in the same category as those Warriors for one overriding reason.
If LeBron and Embiid were both in their primes, these 76ers would be one of the most talented teams ever assembled. But they’re not. This is where we point out that LeBron turns 42 in December, and Embiid is 32, going on about 43.
To lump 2016-17 Curry and 2026-27 Embiid together because they’re both former MVPs is laughable. Curry was the two-time reigning MVP in 2016-17. He was in the dead of his prime. Embiid is past his. The Sixers will be hoping to get 40 games out of him before he tries to hobble through however many postseason rounds they can survive.
Frankly, even when Embiid was in his prime, winning MVP in 2023 and finishing top-two in the two seasons prior, he was never close to the player Curry was in his MVP years. The following claim might be a bit of a stretch, but at this point in all the respective careers involved, it’s not unreasonable to suggest.
I know Kevin Durant is trolling, but:
2016 Steph was a more impactful offensive player than current Embiid, Maxey, Bron, and Jaylen Brown combined. He only took up one roster spot and 16% of the cap.
Also, Draymond was arguably the best defensive player in the league.
The same age and impact gap that exists between current Embiid and MVP Curry applies to current LeBron and 2016-17 Durant, who was also at his peak when he joined the Warriors. LeBron is still a top-20ish player, but the gap between current LeBron and peak Durant is too huge for words.
Putting Curry and Durant together, at that time in their careers, was an all-time pairing on the court. LeBron and Embiid, at least until proven otherwise, are an all-time name pairing on paper. Even if Durant wants to argue the merits of Brown over Thompson (he would have a difficult time factoring in anything other than isolation scoring) and Maxey over Green (again, not even close when examined through any prism other than scoring), the Durant-Curry peak pairing was so outrageously powerful that it overwhelms any attempt to put these two teams in even the same historic zip code, let alone on the same street.
I want to give Durant the benefit of the doubt and say he knows this, and that he’s trolling. But he’s played this scoring card enough to make you think he really does place disproportionate value on it. Personally, I think that he likes to play up “making shots” as a pushback against the analytical-nerd movement that can, at least in the discourse, appear to undervalue purist principles like scoring and one-on-one creation.
I mean the guy once advocated for a team to “build around” .
Kevin Durant on Cam Thomas’ future in the NBA:
“I feel like Cam has a bright future. It just takes somebody to believe in his talent and his skill. Scorers and guys that score the basketball at a high rate, they get taken for granted in this league a bit. We’re so used to loving…
So again, maybe a part of Durant was trolling. Maybe a part of him is trying to diminish the power of that Warriors team in an effort, however subconscious, to continue defending his decision to join it. But on some level, this has been a clear and consistent theme of Durant’s basketball beliefs to evaluate players, and by extension teams, on scoring above all else.
He tried to do it again with this Warriors-76ers comp and fired a few strays at his former teammates for good measure, and those shots, rather ironically, missed badly.
