Kevin Durant's Path to Greatness Won't Follow the LeBron James Blueprint
We can't be sure Kevin Durant will ever reach the NBA's promised land by winning a title. But if he does, we can be certain he'll do it his own way—and not by emulating LeBron James.
So often, we catch ourselves comparing Durant to James, probably because they sit 1-2 (or perhaps 1-1a) in the NBA's superstar hierarchy. It's a shared status that makes KD proud, per an interview with USA Today's Sam Amick:
"I put in the work. And being the best player (in the NBA) is (now) a conversation. If you go out today and say, 'KD is the best player in the world,' that's a conversation. That's not the tell-all, be-all. So when people say, 'Oh, he might have been MVP, but he's not the best player in the world.' Well, I can argue it. We can all argue it.
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We tend to assume Durant's path to greatness will somehow resemble James', perhaps because the stars' only peers are each other. We look for similarities, for common threads. We see Durant's possible free agency in 2016 and start integrating elements of James' Cleveland homecoming into Durant's unwritten story, wondering what it would be like if KD also returned to his roots in D.C.
Amick writes: "It's undeniable that Durant is being watched closely in the context of his greatest rival, as James' lack of a title with the Cleveland Cavaliers led to his departure for the Miami Heat in 2010 and the Heat's loss to the Spurs in June sparked his return home."
That we look at Durant in this context says a lot about what we want him to become. We want KD to author a narrative of redemption like James. We want him to fit into the same kind of satisfying, familiar character arc.
But James' path isn't one Durant will walk.
Two Paths
James' road to greatness started in a far different place than Durant's did, much farther apart than Ohio and Maryland.
Durant explained a key difference between himself and James (and the reason the latter has always faced more pressure to excel) in an interview with B/R this past summer:
"I think coming out of high school, everybody from the outside put so much pressure on LeBron, calling him The King, calling him all these other things, really acting like you thought he was inhuman. ...
For me, I think people know that I'm human, that I make mistakes. It took me some time. I'm not the strongest guy in the league. I didn't come in as some prototypical basketball player. I had to work my way up from the bottom. I didn't come in with so many crazy expectations. I wasn't a child phenom—none of that stuff.
I guess people looked at me as human.
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So as the demands for greatness intensified when James made the Finals at 22, Durant's trip to the NBA's decisive round at 23 was viewed as a pleasantly ahead-of-schedule anomaly. The criticism that attended each player's first-try failure was vastly different.
James was supposed to win, supposed to be great.
Durant didn't catch nearly the same amount of heat for falling short.
Even now, almost every OKC disappointment falls at the feet of Russell Westbrook, the kind of scapegoat James has never had the luxury of playing with.
Growth: Engineered and Organic
James' career narrative has been all about self discovery.
Part of that comes from being a national media focal point from the age of 15. Child stars (precisely what James was) don't always have an easy time establishing a genuine identity because they've been stamped with an artificial one at such an early age.
At the same time, James has embraced this evolution of character. He references growing up all the time, and when he explained his four-year trip to Miami, he compared it to college.
Per his essay with Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, James said: "Miami, for me, has been almost like college for other kids. These past four years helped raise me into who I am. I became a better player and a better man. I learned from a franchise that had been where I wanted to go."
In addition to embracing the growth narrative, James has also been subject to a character evolution ridden with tropes. He was the young savior in Cleveland, then the villain in Miami after his heel turn. Midway through his stint with the Heat, James stopped embracing his role as pariah and became Mr. Nice Guy again.
“To be on the other side, they call it the dark side, or the villain, whatever they call it, it was definitely challenging for myself,” James said in an interview with ESPN, via Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“It basically turned me into somebody I wasn’t. Me, personally, I’m not that guy.”
Then he went back home, where everything (for now) is just perfect.
It was a redemptive storyline like any you'd see on television.
Durant is different. We've had a better sense of who he is all along. And instead of us assigning him some kind of artificial arc or him embracing one, he's just grown up naturally.
His MVP speech was impressive. Genuine.
But it wasn't unexpected. And when he opens up to interviewers like Amick with choice curse words or the occasional politically incorrect answer, we're not surprised either.
"It's like I keep saying: I'm human," Durant told Amick. "Some people look at professional athletes like superheroes and nothing is supposed to affect us. But sometimes it does, and sometimes I go off."
James' story is about a guy learning who he is. Durant's is about someone who's known all along.
His Own Blueprint
So if Durant goes home to the Washington Wizards in two years, there will be elements that resemble the ones from James' story. Some might try to spin it as a betrayal of Oklahoma City, but that angle will lose steam quickly.
Durant has been nothing but loyal to his small-market city, a place with which he had no previous connection. If he leaves, it won't be like James leaving home to chase a ring; it'll be more like Durant gave ring-chasing his best shot in one place and then went home to try it in another.
When we ask if Durant is stuck following James' blueprint, the answer is only "yes" in one sense: He needs a ring to complete his career, to solidify his spot as one of the game's all-time greats.
How he gets that ring and how he solidifies that legacy will be unique to him.
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