Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant scored 29 points Saturday morning in Tokyo to lead the United States to an 87-82 win over France in the gold-medal game. In doing so, Durant not only avenged his first non-exhibition loss while wearing the red, white and blue, he also claimed the title of the greatest U.S. men’s basketball player in Olympics history.
While Durant has competition for USA GOAT status from the women’s side — both Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi are playing for a fifth gold medal later on Saturday — his resume stands above those of the other American men to lead the national team. He is one of only two men’s players with a trio of gold medals, Carmelo Anthony being the other. But unlike Anthony — who, despite his “FIBA Melo” reputation, was not the top performer in any of his Olympic appearances — Durant has been the leading scorer for Team USA in 2012, 2016 and now 2021. No American man has scored more points in Olympic competition than Durant, who passed Anthony earlier in this tournament.
Durant, a two-time NBA champion and former MVP, is the biggest reason why the Americans have won each of the past three gold medals in the face of a major international awakening in the sport that has fueled much stiffer competition in these international tournaments.
Basketball was invented in Massachusetts, but it belongs to the world now. The NBA has handed out three consecutive MVP trophies to international players. Yet, at the exact same time that international teams have started filling their Olympic rosters with legitimate NBA stars, Durant has become the true gold standard.
After Manu Ginobili and the Argentinians shocked the Americans in 2004 in Athens, the 2008 “Redeem Team” righted the ship in Beijing in 2008 by blending overwhelming talent with a team concept that was missing in Greece. Durant, then just a teenager, was one of the last players cut from consideration from that team, but he made his Team USA debut two years later, leading the team to gold at the 2010 FIBA World Championships. That was just a precursor to the record-setting performances he’d put on in leading the United States to three more gold medals, giving the United States its longest uninterrupted run of Olympic success since the nation won the first seven gold medals from 1936 to 1968.
In London in 2012, a 23-year-old Durant — fresh off a disappointing loss in the NBA Finals, managed to break out despite playing on a team that also featured LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, and Anthony, all of whom had shined with the Redeem Team four years earlier. Durant was the team’s leading scorer in four of its eight wins en route to setting a U.S. Olympic record with 156 points in the tournament.
Durant capped the breakout performance by scoring 30 points on 18 shots in a tightly contested gold-medal game against Spain, the first 30-point performance in an Olympic final in U.S. history.
Four years later in Rio, Durant was again unstoppable, logging 155 points including 30 in the gold-medal game against Serbia. Coming into those Rio Games, no American player had ever led Team USA in scoring in multiple Olympics. Durant changed that five years ago, and now he has repeated the feat again in Tokyo, leading the Americans in scoring once again with 124 total points.
This 2021 medal run might be his most impressive yet. In the face of rising international talent, his own recovery from an Achilles injury that left some questioning if he’d ever be the same again, and an exhausting calendar of never-ending basketball that led many players to drop out of Olympic consideration, Durant rose above it all and once again steered the American ship to glory. He was once again at his best when the Americans needed him the most — he put up 21 points in the first half, staking Team USA to a 5-point lead before the Americans broke the game open in the third quarter. His 20.7 points per game in this tournament were a career high for the Olympics (teams played two fewer games this year than in 2012 or 2016).
No one would’ve faulted Durant if he’d decided to skip this year’s Olympics. After all, he’s still just two years removed from the Achilles injury that derailed his prime, he’s just a month removed from an intense playoff disappointment, and of course, he’s participated in the past two summer games in London and Rio. He had nothing left to prove on the international stage, yet he chose to play anyway, getting multiple other stars to follow his example.
“If he had said no, I would have begged, cried, done anything I could to change his mind,” Team USA coach Gregg Popovich told reporters last month.
But there was no begging necessary. While many other elite players opted out of these Games to recoup and prepare for another NBA season following a shortened offseason, Durant chose instead to travel to Japan and compete for another gold. It’s a good thing he did.
Team USA could not have won without its MVP. The team’s only loss in the Olympics, in the opening game against France, came when Durant was limited by foul trouble, playing just 21 minutes before fouling out late in the fourth quarter. In a game the Americans lost by seven, they outscored France by two with Durant on the court. When Durant stayed out of foul trouble the rest of the tournament, Team USA won the next four contests by double-digits before the rematch against the French for the gold.
In the same way that Bryant brought poise and confidence to the 2008 and 2012 teams, Durant supplied that for this group. At 32, Durant has become the American sage on the hardwood, the type of leader younger superstars look up to and learn from. In addition to being the team’s leading scorer, he was its second-leading rebounder and second-leading shot blocker, and he took on the challenge of defending the 7-foot-1 Rudy Gobert in the gold-medal game.
There are multiple reasons why this gold medal is unusually sweet for Team USA. There’s that 2019 failure in China. There were troubling losses in the exhibition games, and the opening loss versus France. And then there’s Durant, who is now the unquestionable MVP of a remarkable 3-peat for men’s basketball at the Olympics.
Team USA is by no means the most cohesive team on the world stage. While teams like Australia and France have grown up together and played together for years, the American team has not, and it showed all tournament long when Team USA would miss rotations on defense or go long stretches without buckets on offense.
But Durant is the kind of player who can mask many of those shortcomings. While it has been seven years since he won his lone NBA MVP, he’s unquestionably still in the conversation as one of the best basketball players in the world. At 32, Durant is squarely in his prime, but following his Achilles injury in 2019, there were real doubts he would ever be at that level again.
Durant’s NBA tenure is already amazing, but his overall basketball legacy is now bolstered by a gleaming international record as well. His performance over the past few months has been nothing short of inspiring. Once again he’s the most unguardable basketball force on planet Earth, and one of the joys of international play is every American gets to root for him. Unlike in the NBA, where he goes from town to town torturing opposing fan bases with his endless buckets, Olympic Durant is here for all Americans, and boy did we need him in Japan.
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