Preseason games are generally not played at the beginning of the season, as this is the moment when the teams do not give their progressive long minutes as coach to train their teams just before the regular season starts. Sunday’s pre-season game between the Brooklyn Nets and the Wizards of Washington was different, however, with the return of Kevin Durant, who played his first game after crushing Achilles in the fifth minute. game of the 2019 NBA final.
It’s been 552 days since Durant was injured as a member of the Golden State Warriors. After the injury, KD along with another long-time All-Star, Kiri Irving, but missed the entire last season. Durant and Irving shared the site for the first time since the signing of the contract with Brooklyn, and the first results promised to win 119-114.
Durant, MVP NBA 2014, lived the action for 24 minutes and ended with 15 points on 5 of the 12, adding three rebounds, three assists and two blocks. Irving finished with 18 points for a 7-on-9 shot, giving him four assists.
And while there is clearly a caveat that the Wizards team plays without Russell Westbrook and Bradley Beale, there was a lot of sympathy when Kevin Durant came back. The return of the Nets in uniform to the field during the warm-up was already a victory for Brooklyn, but the 32-year-old did more than that:
The return journey has begun.
15 points early preseason for @KDTrey5 pic.twitter.com/tPywmhuTIN
– Brooklyn Networks (@BrooklynNets) 14. December 2020.
Hammerblow
Apart from the fact that he and his former teammate Russell Westbrook seem to have buried the hatchet, Kevin Durant’s scoring trick seems to have come back after a long road to recovery. Achilles’ injury is one of the hardest for athletes as it usually lowers their sportsmanship, but for the first ten times the basket of the All-Stars was soaked after shooting the defender early in the first quarter on the sidelines of Brooklyn.
Durant’s almost unblocked jump also appeared on Sunday, when he stopped several times at various Wizard Defenders to get light baskets. Although he missed only two attempts behind the curve, the former MVP was aggressive and managed to score early by driving and trying to jump a foot off the track to give the networks a hot start.
It will probably take some time for Kevin Durant to get used to his new teammates and crush Steve Nash’s head coaching system and the NBA season after such a long break. But the fact that he sucked some tough jumping horses off the field on Sunday gave a normal feeling to the fact that one of the best players in the league is back and doing what he does best.
Chemistry with Kiri Irving and her teammates
One of the problems with the composition of the networks starting the season is that they have many players in their hands who need the ball to play effectively. On Sunday it didn’t seem to be a problem. Brooklyn finished with 23 assists on 38 goals, Kiri Irving with four and Kevin Durant with three.
The two All-Stars also gave fans an idea of what would happen in the regular season in the second quarter after Irving threw a long pass that landed directly into Durant’s hands for a light basketball basket, as the combination proved they could be effective as teammates. It was beautiful to see:
7-11 – Picture.twitter.com/N1rIFeM9TD
– Brooklyn Networks (@BrooklynNets) 14. December 2020.
Durant, who has helped the Warriors on average 5.4 times in three seasons, has also shown that he can find his teammates uninhibited, especially by helping Timothy Luwawu-Cabarrot find a lightweight helmet in his third season. He will probably attract the attention of many defenders and Durant has shown that he is able to find an open man. His teammates have to use these passes during the season.
After more than a year of injury, it will be some time before Kevin Durant regains the form that made him one of the top players in the NBA and a long-term MVP candidate. But on Sunday he showed that his jump was still deadly and that he and Irving and his teammates had worked together to make the network one of the teams that had to watch the Eastern Conference.
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