[Truehoop] Kevin Durant, and expertise

I thought this was one of the best reads out of Truehoop in quite some time.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/63372/kevin-durant-and-expertise

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These guys are professionals not just in terms of talent, but also in terms of knowledge. Basketball is a craft, and the players do a lot more thinking about their craft than performing it for us.

When I was first in the locker room, I got such boring and banal answers to questions -- you could kind of see why people have the notion that NBA players are stupid. It took a shift in topic -- to game strategy -- for the intellect to reveal itself. Ask a guy, “How’d it feel to hit that shot?” and you’ll get some barely coherent false humility. Ask a guy, “Why’d you go away from side pick-and-roll?” and you might get a dizzying dissertation.

“How’d it feel to hit that shot?” gets a terrible answer in part because it’s really hard to sound smart in response to a stupid question. Imagine if great scientists got such questions. “So how’s the lab’s confidence? Will you ride this momentum to the Nobel Prize? How’d it feel to get that federal grant?”

Thankfully, fans and media are smartening up, looking for coverage that’s a little more in-depth than “they just wanted it more.” There’s also a large contingent of viewers and readers who don’t want basketball to be about that at all. They don’t want to conceive of a game that’s decided by a bloodless mix of strategy and luck. They want an opera, wherein the hungriest, angriest, most confident star seizes victory through sheer force of will.

So there’s a lot of incentive to make basketball about something that it isn’t -- something simple and dramatic rather than intricate and nerdy. I once asked Richard Jefferson about whether he was bothered by the information gap between what players know and what the media says. His response: “No, we get that you’re basically writing for seventh-graders.”

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you passed the seventh grade long ago, but there’s something to the idea that sports fandom taps into a middle school id. I’ve seen doctors and lawyers represent themselves like seventh-graders when hollering about their favorite team. I didn’t think Jefferson was being entirely fair, but I also understood his perspective. I don’t think Durant is being entirely fair, but I understand his perspective.

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