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The Making of Kevin Durant



The making of Kevin Durant
By Kevin Robbins, Mark Rosner

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

SUITLAND, Md. — Basketball waited for Kevin Durant on the far side of a football field.

When her youngest son was 7, Wanda Pratt enrolled him in the Boys & Girls Club in Capital Heights, Md., across the Anacostia River from Washington D.C. The fee she paid entitled Durant to every sport the club offered; so when football season ended, Pratt gave his name to the basketball coach. And Durant reported to the gym.

The coach knew nothing about Durant. But he recognized a born basketball player when one appeared on his court.

"He was the tallest kid on the team," Pratt said.

Eleven years later, Durant stands 6-foot-9. With his arms outstretched, he is seven inches wider than he is tall, projecting the appearance of a windmill with four blades.

The gentle facial features of his boyhood remain.

But the rest of him, which continues to grow in all the right ways for a basketball player, has evolved into something Dr. James Naismith likely never imagined in 1891, when he wrote the 13 original rules of the game.

Durant can play all five positions on the court better than most of the population can play one.

His dominion is rare for someone engaged in a team pursuit. Like Roger Federer in tennis or Tiger Woods in golf, Durant excels in every discipline of his sport, so much so that his weaknesses, like playing defense at the frenetic college level, are merely relative. Unlike a point guard whose genetics limit his height or a center whose genetics limit his range, Durant was blessed with the architecture of a prototype: if you have five Kevin Durants, you have a complete team. One that rebounds, dribbles, passes, blocks shots, defends and scores.

But forces beyond physiology conspired to lead the 18-year-old freshman swingman and NCAA player of the year candidate to the University of Texas. One of those forces is the National Basketball Association, which instituted a new regulation for 2007 that requires players to turn 18 before they can pledge their names to the draft. Without that rule, Durant might be playing for the Portland Trail Blazers right now, earning millions of dollars as a lottery-pick rookie with a shoe contract and his image on "NBA 2K7."

The rest of the forces are the people from his past. The evolution of Durant as a player began with his mother, who took him to the Boys & Girls Club so he would have something to do between school and dinner. Others entered his life at the crucial times. Many remain.

Each left a remnant, a fleck of something that — held up to light — glows.

"He had people around him who helped him remain committed," said Pratt, who views her son's success as validation and culmination of blind commitment. "It wasn't easy. But he persevered. Out of all of this, the one thing he knows for sure is that hard work pays off. He's living proof."

Sometime during that first basketball season in Capital Heights, a grandmother of one of Durant's teammates approached Pratt. She told Pratt about a coach at a nearby activity center. He came from the neighborhood. He knew the game.

"She suggested that he (Durant) play for coach Brown," Pratt said.

Pratt recognized the name of the building where Taras Brown molded his young teams. She often saw the Seat Pleasant Activity Center, a low brick building in a stand of evergreens across from the Amoco station on Addison Road, when she took her sons to visit their grandmother.

Brown coached the Prince George's Jaguars, an Amateur Athletic Union team that practiced at the activity center. Now 43, Brown remembers seeing Durant for the first time and noting his unusual height, frail build, enormous feet and flailing stroke. Like many boys his age, Durant shot the ball from his shoulder. It was the only shot he had.

Durant played the center position until he turned 10, when Brown took him aside and said, "Next summer, you're playing the wing."

Brown and Durant spent the winter in the Seat Pleasant gym. The coach put him through shooting drills, passing drills and dribbling drills. An AAU official walked in one day and found Durant in the gym, running and dribbling up and down the scuffed-up court with baby-blue three-point lines, making layups. No one else was around.

Durant's grandmother brought supper to him at the activity center. He ate a bite or two, left the plate and sauntered back to the bin of old, smoothed balls. Durant did his homework in the study room, napped behind a curtain in the gym and practiced until past dark. Brown gave Durant a quotation to remember: Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. He made Durant write it 200 times on a piece of notebook paper.

Brown refused to let Durant play in pickup games at the activity center. The coach thought pickup basketball induced bad habits and poor defense. Instead, Brown made Durant do his drills. Or he hauled him to the L Street hill, which begins at Balsamtree Drive and rises into the Maryland sky.

The L Street hill is known by generations of Seat Pleasant basketball players as Hunt's Hill.

It connects two other streets in a grid of thoroughfares flanked by modest homes owned by middle-class public servants who work for the federal government. From the top of the L Street hill, you can see the Lincoln Memorial and the flag atop the U.S. Capitol.

But Durant saw farther still.

He and his teammates ran up the L Street hill, reached the lamppost, turned, walked backwards down the hill and sprinted up it again. Some boys ran it once or twice and retreated, wheezing, to the comfort of their video games, but not Durant. Neighbors saw him so often they poured him tea when they saw him resting between laps up the hill. The exercise was agonizing, Brown admitted. He sometimes let Durant rest at the top and gaze at the regal domes of the federal buildings of Washington in the distance.

Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

"He wouldn't quit," Brown said. "I would give Kevin days off, and he'd show up at the rec. He wanted to live in the gym."

Brown taught Durant three moves. They formed the foundation of his emerging skill as a threat to score from any point on the court. One was a pull-up jump shot. Another was a two-dribble jump shot. The last was a baseline drive, from which Durant's options were many. When other coaches inquired about his newest wing player, Brown would say dismissively, "He ain't got but three moves."

He neglected to describe the quality of those moves. But certain secrets live very brief lives in the small world of AAU basketball.

P.K. Martin organized the Jaguars and other teams in the Potomac Valley AAU, a sprawling organization that puts 2,700 children from 8 to 14 years old on 180 or so basketball teams. "I've done this for 30 years," Martin said. "How many Kevins have I had? One."

Martin and Brown encountered a coach's dream that pivotal year when Durant was 10. The Jaguars had two tall and powerfully built players in Chris Braswell and Michael Beasley, now seniors in high school committed to play Georgetown and Kansas State. The Jaguars needed another low-post player like Durant needed to learn Sanskrit.

The Jaguars needed guards. Durant learned the wing position three years after his first season in basketball. Then he learned to be a long, wide and conundrum-creating guard who could see and shoot over the top of every defense in youth basketball.

Initially, Durant's mother wondered if her son would score enough as a point guard. Martin assuaged her concerns. "Don't worry about how many points he scores," he said he told her. "Don't worry about how many rebounds he gets. If you want to see what separates him from the other kids, watch how he runs."

Born basketball players run roughly the same speed for three steps, Martin likes to say. Durant was different.

"His next five to seven steps are in separate gears. It's like the first step is at one speed. The second step is at another speed. By the third and fourth steps, he's flying. He'll rebound the ball, kick it out to the wing and practically beat the (opposing) guard down to the other end. That's those coast-to-coast layups Taras used to make him do," Martin said.

Durant played with the Jaguars until he was 14, old enough to move to the Blue Devils, a Washington select AAU team so steeped in talent it frequently entered tournaments in older age brackets because the competition in its own division paled by comparison.

AAU veteran Rob Jackson, who coached the Blue Devils, took Durant on a recommendation from Brown. Durant was good but not exceptional. "He wasn't really the best player out there at the time," Jackson said. "He wasn't on anybody's radar."

In his first season, Durant was a reserve for the Blue Devils' second team, which fed players to the elite travel team that roamed the basketball geography from April to September, competing in tournaments that exposed players to college coaches.

Durant played shooting guard and the small and big forward positions for the Blue Devils' feeder team. He learned more about how to play with his face to the basket in the faster game of 14- and 15-year-olds. And when Durant returned to the Blue Devils after his freshman year in high school, he was a ballhandler in a rebounder's body. He had grown from 6-3 to 6-7.

"Now you're looking at a 6-7 guard who can make an impact," Jackson said.

The move to the travel team meant Durant joined future North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson in the Blue Devils backcourt. "You talk about getting the keys to a Rolls Royce," Jackson said.

Durant reminded Jackson of Tracy McGrady of the Houston Rockets and Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks, players big enough to venture close to the rim and coordinated enough to rip three-point shots in a scrum. Those rare players know how to properly catch a pass, initiate the shot with their knees and impart the perfect rotation with perfect arc on a perfect line — simultaneously. And Durant had something more: desire. He had talent. But he wanted to work hard, too.

"Every 20 years I might see one player with that kind of passion for the game," Jackson said.

Durant spent his first two years of high school at National Christian Academy, a private school in nearby Fort Washington, Md., where future college players such as Patrick Ewing Jr. wore the same white button-down shirt and navy tie as every other boy in the school. The coach there, Trevor Brown, had seen Durant with the Jaguars when the team had Durant, Braswell and Beasley.

"Wow," Brown said, recalling the day he first saw Durant and the Jaguars. "These dudes were pros. This was eighth grade, and these dudes are pros."

Durant spent the first half of his freshman season on the junior varsity squad, where he played all five positions. Then Brown promoted him, making Durant one of three players in Brown's career at National Christian to play varsity as a freshman.

Brown had never seen a player devote himself so much to basketball. Durant practiced and drilled on the maroon rubber court at National Christian, and when he finished he found a ride to the Seat Pleasant Activity Center — Durant has never earned a driver's license — to practice and drill some more.

"That kid was driven," Brown said.

Durant had no other pursuits. He was basketball; basketball was him. The people around him were basketball people. And his parents recognized early that something in his character responded well to reinforcement at home.

His coaches assumed roles the parents of many players never would allow. They were Durant's greatest allies and, when they needed to be, his fiercest critics. His parents wanted it that way. Once, at halftime of a tournament game in Virginia, Durant's mother watched her son struggle on the court with the Blue Devils. She found coach Jackson.

"You need to get in his ass," Jackson said Wanda Pratt told him. "You coach my son."

Durant split his early high school years between the Blue Devils, who played in the spring and summer, and National Christian, which played in the fall and winter. Durant led National Christian in scoring as a sophomore. He played center on defense. "He was our tallest player," Brown said. He switched to guard and small forward on offense, "because he was our best shooter."

Crowds of 500 attended games in the sanctuary-turned-gym to watch Durant, and some people had to stand on the stage to see. Solicitations from college coaches began to collect in coach Brown's mail slot. The Eagles posted a record of 27-3 with Durant at the unorthodox guard/small forward/center position. It was the best record in the history of basketball at National Christian Academy.

That was the year National Christian traveled to Milford, Del., to play in an invitational tournament called the War on the Shore. Dozens of college coaches attend the annual tournament, played in November. For many coaches, the War on the Shore is their first look at the new crop of underclassmen trying to play their way into a college uniform.

Texas assistant coach Russell Springmann went that year to examine someone else. But the sophomore small forward for National Christian caught his notice. Springmann liked small forwards and big guards: hybrid players who not only add dimensions to a team but invent new ones. Springmann saw Durant loft a three-point shot from the corner.

"I didn't see much of the game, to tell you the truth," Springmann recalled. "But that was the one thing that stood out."

He wanted to know more about the intriguing young player who not only acted like a guard and forward and a center but was. Springmann produced a sheet of paper: a so-called player profile, the standard form that launches the recruiting journey of every player who becomes a Longhorn and the many others who do not.

He wrote Durant's name and put the piece of paper away. He called coach Brown at National Christian a short time later, which is how Texas became the first major basketball program to express interest in a player who would later be able to choose to play wherever he saw fit.

Before his junior year, Durant visited Oak Hill Academy with Ty Lawson and Jackson, their coach for the D.C. Blue Devils.

They traveled 360 miles from Maryland to a remote village called Mouth of Wilson, Va. Snug in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, Mouth of Wilson holds scarcely more than a few vacant brick buildings on U.S. 58, a wide stretch of the New River and Oak Hill, a 129-year-old Baptist school with about 140 students in grades eight through 12 and the most dominant prep basketball program in modern history.

The modest Turner Gymnasium at Oak Hill functions as a Petri dish from which the future of the NBA springs.

Carmelo Anthony played at Oak Hill before a season at Syracuse, a national championship and an All-Star career in the NBA. Ron Mercer, the sixth pick of the 1997 NBA draft, once scored 41 points in a game for the Oak Hill Warriors. Josh Smith of the Atlanta Hawks holds the Oak Hill record for points in a season. Dallas Maverick Jerry Stackhouse won the Nike player of the year award in 1993 at Oak Hill.

Warriors head coach Stephen Smith met Durant, Lawson and Jackson at the gym that day in 2004.

Durant entered the gym, looked up at the rafters and saw six banners declaring Oak Hill the national champions of high school basketball. He noticed the jerseys from the best college basketball programs in the country — Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky and Connecticut among them — suspended from the cinder-block walls.

He bounced a ball. It thumped on the same polished wood floor that 133 boys who eventually played Division I basketball once ran.

Durant looked young for his age, Smith recalled. "I don't think he even shaved," he said. In a workout, Smith assigned Durant to defend Josh Smith, a 6-9 senior who would, at the end of the year, skip college altogether to become the first-round pick of the Atlanta Hawks.

"Here's Kevin, 15 years old, going against a first-round draft pick," Stephen Smith said, remembering the workout. "It was fairly even, to be honest."

Durant joined the Oak Hill Warriors as a junior with his longtime friend and teammate Lawson. He started every game for Oak Hill.

His parents agreed to send Durant to Oak Hill because Oak Hill is Oak Hill. "I had always heard about Oak Hill," said his mother. "Every kid wanted to go to Oak Hill." If coach Smith wanted her son, Wanda Pratt reasoned, who was she to interfere?

"I said, 'Man, this is big,' " Pratt said.

With Lawson, future Syracuse starter Eric Devendorf and Jamont Gordon of Mississippi State in the backcourt, Oak Hill's coach employed Durant at the power forward position, where he trailed on breaks and caught passes beyond the three-point line, free to shoot or dribble and drive. "He can run with the best of them," Smith said.

He was imperfect. Durant dissolved at times from the ebb of the 32-minute game. Smith said he occasionally noticed that Durant floated through periods: not a liability, but not entirely engaged. "I don't know if he got bored out there or what. There were times I would go, 'Kevin, man, just take the game over. You've got the ability to do that.' "

A few minutes in Portland, Ore., secured Durant's legacy at Oak Hill.

The Warriors were in the semifinal game of an invitational tournament. Oak Hill was losing late in the fourth quarter to a nationally ranked team from Portland. The team needed a jolt from within. Smith motioned for a timeout. He was desperate.

Smith called a rare offensive set: five-out motion, a formation that demands players drive to the basket.

"Kevin makes a three," Smith said. "Then he gets to the basket and gets fouled, and it's a three-point play. Then he makes another three."

Durant scored again. He cobbled nine points before his coach could realize what happened.

"And lo and behold you turn around 40 seconds later and the game's tied," Smith said. "I mean, boom! I think he only had 12, 13 points for the whole game. But he scored them all at the end."

Durant rebounded a missed shot from the Portland team. It sealed the game and, by Smith's account, the season.

Oak Hill won 34 games that year and lost two. Durant led the Warriors, which sent nine seniors to Division I basketball teams, with 19.6 points a game and 8.8 rebounds. He sharpened his ascent to the summit of high school basketball. And he had another season to go.

"As the year went on — his feel for the game, the way he saw the floor — he got to be so much better as a total player," Smith said.

When he first watched Durant in that workout with Josh Smith, the coach wondered how good this quiet, reedy but pliable player from Maryland could be. Was he college material? Certainly. An NBA player? Probably. But a king of the court, born to reign?

After the game in Portland, Smith knew.

"Yes."

Durant took his official recruiting visit to Texas at the conclusion of the 2004-2005 season. Springmann, the Texas assistant who saw Durant as a sophomore at the War on the Shore, had seen Durant play at an AAU tournament in Las Vegas and gone to Oak Hill before his junior year to watch Durant practice. "Every chance I had to watch him, I did," Springmann said.

His persistence impressed Durant and his parents. When Durant's father called Springmann to arrange the visit, the Texas coach praised the closeness of the Longhorns to head coach Rick Barnes, the new Denton A. Cooley Pavilion next to the Erwin Center and the recent successes of the program, including a trip to the 2003 Final Four. He reminded Pratt that Barnes let players do what they do best. Brad Buckman was 6-9; he roamed the perimeter. P.J. Tucker was 6-5; he played inside.

"The one thing I can promise you is that your son's going to be cared for," Springmann said he told Wayne Pratt.

Durant and his father came to Austin in May. They met Todd Wright, the strength and conditioning coach. Wright brought Durant into his training room. He watched Durant's gait and how his long, lean muscles functioned. He studied his posture. He took measurements. He analyzed the way his joints worked.

"When he started to move, I couldn't believe it," Wright said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Wright noticed problems in Durant's body. There was tightness in his ankles, back and left hip, which Wright detected by looking at how his right arm swung when he walked. Yet Durant somehow managed to be one of the best 16-year-old players in the world, someone who could rise 17.5 inches above the rim with one step.

Durant reminded Wright of T.J. Ford, the Texas point guard on the Final Four team. Like Ford, Durant practically sprung from the ground, as if his frame were loaded on springs. "His electrical system is high-powered. That is an incredible gift that so many people do not have," Wright said. "It's not power. It's the ability to repeat power."

Wright longed to have a chance at Durant. At making someone so good even better.

Wright wanted to put Durant in the stretch cage to loosen his ankles and hip. He imagined how he might bolster Durant's stamina by making him eat breakfast, a meal Durant routinely skipped. Wright took inventory of the equipment in his room: the vibration plate, the dumbbells, the medicine balls, the pulleys that strengthen the core. He visualized Durant at work in the gym.

"The bottom line is, physically, he's just scratching the surface," Wright said, recalling his first impressions of Durant. "That's the scary thing. I can't wait to see what he turns into in two or three years."

That night, Wright and the other coaches took Durant and his father to dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House. An NBA playoff game was on TV. Barnes cajoled Durant throughout the meal. At the time, the Texas coaches believed Durant would likely commit to North Carolina. But something happened that night over steaks on West Sixth Street.

Springmann felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Wayne Pratt. Pratt pointed to his son, who sat across the table next to Barnes. They were laughing hysterically.

"That's what I'm looking for," Pratt told Springmann. Soon after, Durant committed to Texas.

Parade Magazine named Durant a second-team All American as a junior at Oak Hill. But the heaviest pile of honors — Rivals.com's second-best prospect in America, an MVP title in the Jordan Classic, the World Select and Nike Hoops Summit and the McDonald's High School All American teams — cascaded onto his shoulders after his senior season at Montrose Christian School.

Durant's parents moved him home to live with them in their apartment, where they could monitor their son's final, crucial year of high school. They chose Montrose, a small academy in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Rockville, Md.

"It was a very structured school," Wanda Pratt said of Montrose.

As National Christian and Oak Hill had done the three years before, Montrose offered enough financial aid that Durant's father, a police officer for the Library of Congress, and his mother, who works for the postal service, could afford the private-school tuition.

Like National Christian and Oak Hill, Montrose sacrificed nothing when it came to basketball.

Head coach Stu Vetter patterned his program after the college model. Players for his Montrose Mustangs wear coats and ties on game days. They learn the proper way to sign an autograph. They know which fork to use, when; they learn the correct way to pass salt. They practice their handshake.

They play all over the country. They win wherever they go. Vetter produced Cory Alexander, Jason Capel, Linas Kleiza and Dennis Scott, among other college and NBA players. Montrose routinely lands in the national high-school polls. And when Durant arrived as the top small forward in the nation, USA Today had the Mustangs ranked No. 1.

Vetter immediately changed the way Durant played defense. He moved Durant a step farther from his man. With his abnormally long arms and astronomic reach, Durant could give himself space and still swarm the ball. "We taught him to play position defense," Vetter said.

The staff at Montrose faced deeper issues than Durant's defense. Durant needed to qualify academically to play NCAA basketball.

"We had to map out a program for him," Vetter said. "It was a monumental task."

Vetter assigned head assistant coach Josh Hutchison to guide Durant through his year at Montrose. They met before study hall. They made plans for the day, the week, the semester, the year. Durant sat in the front row when he went to composition, senior English, anatomy, Bible and drama. His coaches made him. He brought his homework on the road. He once skipped a tournament in Japan because he'd missed too much school for games.

"He put his head down," said Hutchison, now a graduate assistant at Towson State in Baltimore. "He did his work."

Durant took the subway from Suitland to Rockville, an hour-long trip. He sometimes spent the night with Taishi Ito, the Montrose guard from Japan who lived nearby with a member of the Baptist Church. Ito liked to go to the gym an hour and fifteen minutes before school. So Durant went with him.

"Sometimes we played one on one for fun," said Ito, a 6-0 freshman for the University of Portland basketball team. "It was so weird. Whenever I play against big men, they play inside. But Kevin, he could shoot. He'd give me some move and shoot outside."

The one-year plan for Durant included preparing him for the rigors of Big 12 basketball.

Another Montrose assistant, David Adkins, arranged chairs and trash cans on the Montrose court. He made Durant scramble around the obstacles with his hands up and his shoulders low. If his shoulders got too high, Adkins made him stop and start again. Even with the high center of gravity of a towering ectomorph, Durant was able to get low and move nimbly. It was like every part of him was elastic.

"Kevin's so physically talented, he can do things you can't teach," Adkins said.

But Adkins, who played at Radford, could teach Durant the difference between basketball in high school, where most players will never touch a college floor, and basketball at Texas, where everyone on the floor was some variation of a high-school star.

"When we got him, he wanted to get to Texas, and we laid out a plan," Adkins said. "We wrote it down: This is what you have to do to be able to go to Texas."

Durant averaged 23.6 points and 10.2 rebounds a game for the Mustangs. In his final game, Montrose met his old team, Oak Hill. The undefeated Oak Hill Warriors led by 16 with the fourth quarter left to play. After a flurry of blocks, net-snapping jump shots and rim-rattling dunks, Durant ended the game with 31 points. And he left the court for the last time as a winner.

Ty Lawson, his former AAU teammate and a senior point guard for Oak Hill, could do nothing but admire what Durant had done.

"Once he got hot, I knew it was going to be trouble," Lawson said.

Durant graduated with his classmates at Montrose. He accepted his diploma in the sanctuary as his coaches and parents watched.

"It was a very, very proud moment to watch Kevin walk across the stage," said Hutchison, the Montrose assistant assigned to supervise Durant's academics.

The plan had worked. Going back to when a mother took her young son to the Seat Pleasant Activity Center after his first season of basketball, the people responsible for shaping Durant waited to see what would happen at Texas. The evolution continued 1,500 miles away.

Durant gained 10 pounds during his first two weeks in Austin. He ate breakfast. Wright, the Longhorns' strength coach, designed a plan to strengthen him where was weak and loosen him where he was tight. By the end of summer, Durant carried 225 pounds.

He practiced with his new teammates at Cooley. He led fast breaks. Sometimes he passed, sometimes he shot. He slashed. He converted layups with both hands. He looked like an All-American. He had just turned 18.

With the departure of all three of his starting forwards from the year before, Barnes had lost the best rebounding margin in America. That left him with three freshmen who could play inside: Matt Hill, Dexter Pittman and Durant. The season began with uncertainty.

Durant missed seven of his first eight shots in the Longhorns' first exhibition game against Lenoir-Rhyne College. Most were from the perimeter. "I was a little nervous," said Durant. "In the first half, I just wanted to take shots just to take them."

Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 9, Durant scored 20 against Alcorn State. It was a Texas record for a freshman's first game.

All of his skills were on display that night. Durant drove, dunked, converted three-point shots and made no-look passes at one end of the court. He produced three steals and two blocks at the other end. Only 4,132 spectators were there, fewer than half the team's season-ticket holders. Many seemed more interested in the Rutgers-Louisville football game on the flat-screens in their luxury suites than they were in Barnes' new swingman.

The audiences came later. On Dec. 20, nearly 12,000 saw Durant score 28 points against Arkansas, most of them under or not far from the basket. Durant now stations himself inside for at least part of every game. Barnes figures no matchup really works against Durant. He is much quicker than most big men and too tall and long for the guards.

Durant scored 29 during a 10-point loss to Gonzaga. He did it with drives, perimeter shots, a jump-hook and 10 free throws. But Barnes was dissatisfied that Durant settled for three-point shots when isolated against bigger, slower players. As the Longhorns left the court during a timeout, an annoyed Barnes met Durant and barked, "Take him!"

"No big man can guard him," Barnes said after the game.

Few can. Few have.

Durant notched 37 points in Lubbock against coach Bob Knight's disciplined Texas Tech players. It was his third 37-point game in January. He scored 24 in the second half and 18 in the last 11 minutes. Jumpers. Drives. Shots in the post. Shots from the arc. Shots from every point on the court. Durant matched the conference record with 23 rebounds. He blocked a shot. He stole the ball three times.

He'd written it down. Two-hundred times. Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

In Lubbock, Barnes told reporters: "You saw the best player in college basketball give maybe the best performance in college basketball this year."

What you saw in Lubbock is what you didn't see.

One day, Durant went to talk with his mother. He was 11, maybe 12, as Wanda Pratt remembers it. Her son was a Jaguar for the coach at the Seat Pleasant Activity Center, where he ran ladders instead of playing pickup games and spent hours with Hunt's Hill instead of PlayStation and instead of going home for a nap, slept behind a curtain in a gym.

Yes Kevin?

I want to be a basketball player.

Are you sure?

I'm sure.

Then commit to being a basketball player. Commit, the mother told her son. You think about that. Come back and tell me after you have.

"He did," Wanda Pratt said. "The next day."

What you saw in Lubbock was what his mother told him next. She spoke for more people than she possibly could have imagined.

"Then I'm going to help."

 

Durant's year in Austin

Durant's year in Austin
From nutrition to defense, freshman has matured as a Longhorn.
By Mark Rosner
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Before Kevin Durant hit the basketball court for his freshman season at Texas, he hit the training table.

Durant's heralded season in Austin began under the direction of Longhorn basketball strength and conditioning coach Todd Wright. Durant gained 10 pounds during his first two weeks in Austin last summer.

A change in lifestyle was the biggest factor. Breakfast had never been a habit for him, but it became one. Soon, he could be found with a bowl of oatmeal before morning workouts.

Durant was surprised when his weight increased so quickly.

"When I went from 205 to 215, I looked around to see if anybody was stepping on the scales," Durant recalled. "But it was all me."

By the end of summer, Durant carried 225 pounds, more prepared than before for the demands coach Rick Barnes would issue.

The additional weight didn't appear to serve as an anchor.

One day in October, a visitor to practice found Durant with the versatility that has induced Barnes to almost show contempt for those naive enough to define his freshman by position.

One trip down the court, Durant would lead the fast break using the dexterity of a point guard. On another possession, he'd pull up for a jumper with the smooth stroke of a shooting guard. Durant as small forward was the consummate slasher, slithering through small spaces, making baskets with either hand.

Later he moved inside, the domain of the center or power forward, signalling for the ball with those long arms, receiving lob passes.

The only thing missing on that day was the flurry of three-point baskets on which Durant built much of his reputation. He made a few but missed several from the right corner, usually a good spot for him.

Barnes was not the least bit concerned. He smiled and said, "You haven't seen anything. This was his worst day shooting the ball."

Impressive as Durant was maneuvering toward the rim, Barnes would need more from him — those flashes of skill he displayed around the basket, in the low post.

The coach faced a season with the youngest team in America among elite programs, four freshmen and a sophomore in the starting lineup. Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun has been starting two, sometimes three, freshmen, completing the lineup with sophomores, the only team comparable.

All five Longhorn starters were missing from last season, including the players who enabled Texas to lead the nation in rebounding margin: LaMarcus Aldridge, P.J. Tucker and Brad Buckman.

Barnes was left with no formidable talent or experience inside. Sophomore Connor Atchley, the only returning post player, averaged less than eight minutes a game last season, working the perimeter on offense.

As he assessed the freshmen, Barnes figured that 6-9 freshman Matt Hill might help inside and that 6-10 Dexter Pittman lacked the stamina to provide much this season.

Barnes summoned Durant to the interior, an area of the court he tended to avoid in high school. Durant had a new part-time job: post player.

Barnes says Durant had always been willing to "settle" for the long pull-up shots at which he was adept, a waste, in some respects, of talent that could produce layups, dunks and free throws.

Durant started off like that in the Longhorns' first exhibition game against Lenoir-Rhyne College on Oct. 31, working primarily on the perimeter and missing seven of his first eight shots.

"I was a little nervous," Durant would say later. "My first college game. In the first half, I just wanted to take shots just to take them."

Eventually, he worked his way inside that night by driving. He hit 6 of his next 9 after the slow start.

Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 9, Durant made a more overwhelming impression in his regular-season debut. He set a Longhorn record for a freshman in his first game with 20 points, including 18 in the first half, playing 22 minutes against Alcorn State.

Most of his talent and skill was on display that night. He drove, dunked, converted three-point shots and made no-look passes at one end of the court. He produced three steals and two blocks at the other end.

"He can give it to you a lot of different ways," Barnes noted, something the coach would repeat often this season.

Only 4,132 fans showed up for the occasion, fewer than half the team's season-ticket holders. Some of them had divided loyalty in the second half, watching televisions in the luxury suites as Rutgers beat Louisville in football, an important game at the time for the Longhorns' chances to repeat as national champions.

Durant seemed amused but not offended by the passion directed at another sport. Heck, his father, Wayne, is a Texas football fan, a longtime friend of former Longhorns wide receiver Lovell Pinkney.

"I was on the bench wondering that they were screaming for," Durant said of the distracted fans at what's known as a football school. "It's my intention to make it a basketball school."

Larger audiences would come later, the first one on Dec. 20 for a game against Arkansas. Nearly 12,000 witnessed a significant point in Durant's development. He decided that it was time, 10 games into the season, for him to rectify the team's most glaring weakness on offense, lack of scoring in the low post. He scored 28 points during the 80-76 victory.

Durant, in what would become a common refrain, said, "Whatever my team needs I'll try to do."

He cites that night against Arkansas as the catalyst for diversification, a turning point in his season.

"I remember Arkansas because I took it upon myself to go inside against the big guys," Durant said more than a month after that game. "I think ever since then I've been doing that. I'm being more aggressive going to the basket."

Texas' coaches knew Durant was capable of playing inside because of his length and shooting touch.

"The funny thing was, there was a guy here from one of the NBA teams, and he mentioned before the game that he never sees Kevin inside," Longhorn assistant Russell Springmann said. "I didn't see the guy after the game, but I wondered what he would say now."

Durant is now stationed inside for at least part of every game, Barnes figuring no matchup really works against Durant. He is much quicker than most big men, too tall and long for the guards.

But that's just Durant as a force of nature. He is also the product of diligence and discipline, somebody who works at his craft. Nobody is just blessed with a jump-hook shot Durant exhibits in the lane or the deft footwork he uses to create baskets inside like some veteran NBA big man, a Hakeem Olajuwon or Tim Duncan.

Springmann regards Durant as eager for self-fulfillment.

"Coach had talked to him about wanting to be a total player, and that he should take advantage of the fact that he is a tremendous post player," Springmann said. "During a (game-day) shootaround, he'll go through a series where everything at the beginning is in the post. So it's something that he's worked on."

One NBA scout told the American-Statesman this season that he likes the way Barnes holds his players accountable. The scout might have appreciated how Barnes admonished Durant for his defense against Arkansas even while praising his work on offense.

Barnes said that Durant became too timid and tentative after incurring foul trouble, allowing Arkansas players to receive passes in positions where they could score easily.

"I told him, 'Don't foul,' " Barnes said. "But when you're young, you translate that to 'don't defend.' We can't let people get the ball two feet from the basket."

Barnes can be harsh and unrelenting with his players, and the stars don't receive waivers. After the game against Arkansas, the coach smiled as he described his working relationship with Durant.

"I give him a hard time about his defense, because it bothers him," Barnes said. "When he gets bothered, he gets angry, and when he gets angry, he gets pretty good. I know the pride he brings."

Durant, like many high school stars, was not much of a defender when he arrived at college. The top players often expend most of their energy scoring points and maybe competing for rebounds. Aggressive defense can produce foul difficulty, sending the star to the bench.

"I was horrible at the beginning of the year," Durant said.

Durant has improved on defense more than any area. Opponents who get past Durant near the basket find that positioning does not necessarily ensure success. He compensates for a lack of bulk and experience by using his quickness and long arms to alter, deter and block shots. Durant leads the Longhorns with 50 blocks, three of them on consecutive shots by Kansas State guard Clent Stewart.

Several times this season, Barnes proudly said that Durant, after producing another prolific performance on offense, would ask someone on the coaching staff if his defense had been sufficient.

Barnes has not reserved his pointed critiques for Durant's defense. Nearly three weeks before the Arkansas game, Durant had taken a lesson in offense from Barnes during a high-profile game against Gonzaga in Phoenix.

Durant scored 29 during a 10-point defeat that was much worse than the final tally. He scored with drives, perimeter shots, a jump-hook and 10 free throws. But Barnes was nevertheless dissatisfied that Durant settled for three-point shots when isolated against big, slower players. As the Longhorns left the court during a timeout after one of those attempts, an annoyed Barnes met Durant and said, "take him," by driving.

"No big man can guard him," Barnes said after the game.

Barnes was asked what constitutes a bad perimeter shot for Durant, a sometimes spectacular marksman from long distance.

"When it doesn't follow the game plan," Barnes said.

Indeed, Barnes often prefers that Durant drive inside to draw fouls that can produce free throws and send opponents to the bench. Durant does not always heed those instructions, but has gone to the free-throw line more frequently in Big 12 competition (8 shots a game) than he did against non-conference opponents (5.8).

"He should shoot 15 a game," Barnes said.

Durant has increased more than just his free-throw production since Big 12 competition began in January. He has averaged 28.6 points a game in the Big 12, nearly four more than his overall mark.

The emergence came quickly, Durant scoring a season-best 37 points and taking 16 rebounds at Colorado in his first Big 12 game on Jan. 6. Not bad for a guy who said he was "about to cry" early in the game because of the 5,430-foot altitude in Boulder.

"I didn't see any flaws in his game," Colorado coach Ricardo Patton said.

If Durant detects any, he tries not to let them to linger. It's not uncommon for him to show up at the Cooley Pavilion practice facility when the team has a day off.

Durant was there working on his shot one Sunday in early January, and no wonder: He'd only scored 37 that Saturday at Colorado.

If Durant set the foundation for a legend in Boulder, he would soon erect the structure piece by piece.

Ten days after Colorado, he produced 37 points at Oklahoma State in the triple-overtime iconic ESPN Classic, albeit in defeat. He scored 27 after halftime, including five straight during the final 1:04 of the second overtime. He tied the game with 18 seconds left in that period by converting a fast-break dunk after blocking 6-8 David Monds' jump shot on the perimeter.

Durant totaled 26 points and 15 rebounds at Nebraska on Jan. 22 despite feeling the breath of three or even four defenders whom Huskers coach Doc Sadler assigned to the role of shadows. Durant used his length and determination to score three times in the second half after retrieving missed shots by his teammates.

"You need about three guys for a chance to contain him," Sadler said before the game. "Superman, I guess, is the word you can call him."

Sadler had not yet seen the best of Durant. During a victory at Texas Tech on Jan. 31, Durant notched 37 points for the third time in less than a month while matching the Big 12 record with 23 rebounds. He scored 24 in the second half — including 18 during the final 11 minutes — with a dazzling array of jump shots, drives and post moves.

And talk about dutifully following instructions:

"Coach told me to get every rebound," Durant said.

"You saw the best player in college basketball give maybe the best performance in college basketball this year," Barnes said after the game.

Barnes, perhaps for the first time, said in public what he had allowed in a private conversation last summer, that he believes Durant is the best player in the country. Not merely the best freshman.

Durant's coach was not alone in that assessment. Pretty soon ESPN's Dick Vitale was touting Durant for player of the year. Others with influence either agreed or included Durant in the conversation.

Sports Illustrated put him on the cover of its Feb. 19 edition, the headline signifying "Year of the Freshman. Kevin Durant leads the best class ever."

Last week at Oklahoma, Durant scored 32, setting a Big 12 record with 400 points in conferences games.

And counting.