DirtyDez wrote:tsherkin wrote:DirtyDez wrote:It was clearly in reply to the tone of the post I quoted. KD was 1st team all nba and 2nd in mvp that year. Of course he didn’t do it alone but was by far the best player on the team. He averaged 30 ppg in the WCF and Finals at 23 years old.
He was obviously very good, yes. But again, he had a great deal of help and a shortened season in that run, so propping that up as relevant to a discussion of him replacing Bird on the Celtics doesn't really make sense to me.
Very good huh. He finished 2nd in MVP to apex Lebron. 2012 KD is an underrated postseason in recent years. The only thing you can really nitpick is a high turnover rate but if not for some questionable officiating down the stretch of game 2 or South Beach consuming Harden we could be talking about an all time run. Contrary to popular belief the guy has had some impressive playoff performances outside of Golden St.
None of this is salient to what I said. You're picking at nits because I didn't spend an entire paragraph extolling his value as a player for the sake of brevity. Durant is a notably superior scoring force to Larry Bird, this we know, but there are other elements to Bird's utility.
Bird definitely had some short-fall scoring performances in the playoffs. KD has had a couple as well. Where that intersection is for scoring vs playmaking/rebounding/defense and stuff is an interesting discussion. But again, it's worth rehashing the old "efficient volume scoring goes only so far" ham, and that the environment of the 80s wasn't quite the same as today. KD would get HAMMERED on travels and palming and stuff, at least for the first little while, if he tried to play as he does today. And dudes camping out right under a rim with no restricted zone and what not is a little different than it is today as well.
