Durant's Heavy Minutes Burden Hard for Nets to Avoid, But KD Says Bring It On
PORTLAND, Ore. — Kevin Durant doesn't want to hear about how many minutes he's playing.
The subject of Durant's minutes is going to continue to be an issue for the Brooklyn Nets, who have lost five of their last seven games and are in the process of reintegrating Kyrie Irving into the rotation. Monday night's 114-108 road loss to the Portland Trail Blazers came on the second night of a back-to-back, about 36 hours after an overtime win at home against San Antonio followed by a six-hour flight.
Durant played 42 minutes in Portland, after playing 43 against the Spurs. On the season, he's averaging 37.4 minutes per game, second only to Toronto's Fred VanVleet (37.5). It's his heaviest workload since his MVP season (38.5), in 2013-14. He's also 33, two years removed from a torn Achilles that cost him the entire 2019-20 season, and playing for a team with every intention of still playing in June.
With Irving only available for road games as he continues to resist New York City's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and fellow superstar James Harden having a (relatively) down season, Durant has had to shoulder a bigger load. He's done it brilliantly—he's on the very short list of MVP front-runners—but it's something to monitor.
"No! Let me die out there!" Durant joked after the game, when he was asked if he was concerned about his workload, before getting serious for a second. "But no, I'm not concerned. Whenever coach wants to give me a day, I'll support that. But I'm not looking for one. I'm just gonna play until they tell me I'm sitting out. But that's not on my mind when I'm playing. That's not on my mind when I'm preparing for a game. It is what it is. I gotta play 40, so what? If they tell me to sit out, I'm gonna do the same thing."
Nets coach Steve Nash said he will look to give Durant a game off in the coming days to make up for the heavy usage, but he knows as well as anyone that there are too many moving parts to be able to be as conservative as they might be normally. The pandemic has thrown the concept of load management out the window, with whatever players are available needing to play as much as they can as teams deal with outbreaks that have required reinforcements from the G League.
Monday's game in Portland, as a matter of fact, required that unprecedented short-turnaround flight because it was rescheduled from late December because of the Nets not having enough available players.
"It would be great to have Kevin play 32 minutes a night and keep him really fresh," Nash said. "The reality is we'll probably need him to play more. He wants to play more. And so we try to pick our spots in other ways. Miss a game here and there to make up for the higher minutes."
Irving, too, has been thrown into the fire in his first two games back, although his situation is of his own doing considering his stance on vaccination. He admitted on Monday night that he still hasn't gotten his wind back.
"It would be great if we didn't have to get him up to 40 tonight," Nash said before the game in Portland, in which Irving played exactly 40 minutes. "But at the same time, I think he's got the bulk of his preparation and his legs and is ready to play as much as needed. You don't want to play him 44 minutes tonight, then he's got to turn around and play a big game on Wednesday. So we'll play him more minutes, but we would love for it to be gradual and a strategic allocation of minutes, not just like, 'All right, great, we got a new Ferrari, and we're going to rack up the miles.'"
For many reasons, the Nets will have no choice but to rack up those miles to keep pace in the Eastern Conference. The Chicago Bulls, who they face Wednesday, have the best record in the Eastern Conference, and the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat aren't far behind. Those teams, like everyone else in the league this season, have dealt with their share of absences to key players, but nothing like what the Nets are dealing with. No one has ever dealt with anything quite like this.
Wednesday in Chicago may be a preview of the Eastern Conference Finals, and all eyes will be on Irving, Durant and Harden—and on how many minutes they play. They're hoping if they are in fact in this spot in late May, this discussion will be in the past.
