To hear some ex-players tell it, the NBA in the 1980s and 1990s was a combat sport. Perimeter defenders could hand-check with impunity, every team had an enforcer and, if one of today's stars were to travel back in time, he'd be cowering in the corner of the locker room after being served an elbow sandwich on his first foray to the paint. The game was just harder back then, they say, and players were physically and mentally tougher.
Kevin Durant isn't buying all that. On an episode of his podcast, "The ETCs," published Wednesday, Durant said he's been watching old game film and, aside from some uncalled flagrant fouls, doesn't think that the NBA was necessarily more physical back in the day.
"I go back and watch a lot of that '90s film, '80s stuff, and they play physical but I just think they got away with a lot of flagrant fouls," Durant said. "And I think that's why they call their era more physical than ours. Because guys, we play physical here, too. There's more space, but guys play physical, we got strong, athletic guys here, too. But I watched some of those games, the paint was clear, nobody was getting touched, it wasn't a lot of help defense. But you did get a lot of flagrant fouls [that] didn't result into fines or getting kicked out the game, so it just seemed like it was a little tougher."
This is a clear-eyed assessment. If a "tougher" style of play is one in which you're more likely to get a concussion without any significant punishment being doled out to the guy who gave it to you, then no, the league isn't as tough as it was when the Bad Boys or Pat Riley's New York Knicks were clobbering drivers.
But the game has evolved in all sorts of areas that have nothing to do with violent collisions around the rim. Freed from the constraints of "illegal defense" rules, teams can throw sophisticated schemes at star scorers, so offenses can no longer simply walk the ball up, call a post-up or isolation play and force a hard double-team. Players are more skilled, specialists are virtually extinct and the pace-and-space revolution has changed everything.
If a "tougher" style of play is one that is more physically and mentally taxing on a possession-by-possession basis, one that requires players to cover more ground, make more decisions and change directions more often, then the league has never been tougher than it is right now. Just ask Bad Boy Joe Dumars, the NBA's executive vice president and head of basketball operations.
"You have to acknowledge that there's more pace in the game today than before," Dumars told ESPN's Baxter Holmes recently. "The floor is more spread, probably a lot more cutting. All of those things are factual. I don't think there's any argument to that. What it does to the body, I presume, it probably stresses the body as much as anything. I don't see how someone could argue against that."
Even in the course of Durant's NBA career, which began in 2007, the league has changed significantly. He is the beneficiary of much better spacing than he had as a rookie, and his per-game scoring numbers would look worse if pace had not skyrocketed leaguewide. The official embrace of the "gather step" and widespread adoption of the Eurostep have benefited offensive players, and, generally speaking, on-ball defenders are given less freedom to grab, hold and otherwise impede ballhandlers from getting where they want to go.
None of this, however, means that what guys like Durant do is easy, even if they often make it look that way. In the 2021 playoffs, the Milwaukee Bucks essentially dared Durant to beat them by themselves, knowing that it would be exhausting for him to deal with P.J. Tucker harassing him on every possession. For a not-at-all-fun time, watch that series again and imagine having to carry that offensive load with that particular defender up in your space, while having to protect the rim and switch onto smaller players on the other end.
In the 2022 playoffs, the Boston Celtics threw an army of big, long, strong defenders at Durant, making him work for every touch and stationing help defenders in driving lanes. If the Phoenix Suns' opponents in this year's playoffs borrow the Celtics' game plan, it's because they made Durant as uncomfortable as he has ever looked in his NBA career. And no, Boston did not commit a single flagrant foul in the series.
