Watching Kevin Durant, Who Is as Impossible and Unstoppable as Ever

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

For a team so reliant on two players, the Oklahoma City Thunder look remarkably balanced when they're rolling. This is a mirage—check the box score, and Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook will be right at the top—but it's a convincing one. They come at you like a wide, fast wave, and everything from a Steven Adams scoop-and-slam to an Andre Roberson wind-up three to a Dion Waiters quadruple-crossover contributes to that effect. At their best, the Thunder are all quick strength, or strong quickness, a blur from one rim to the other.

Really, though, the Thunder owe their present success mostly to their two superstars and, to narrow it down further, to Durant. It was Durant who, when Oklahoma City trailed San Antonio two games to one in the Western semis, dropped a cool 41 to even the series; it was him again, two games later, who led the Thunder with 37 more in the clincher. At the end of a sloppy first game of the Western Conference Finals, when Durant and Westbrook had combined to shoot 16 for 50, Durant shimmied and drained a jumper from the right wing to seal the win. And Sunday night, when the Thunder made the Warriors look worse than they have in two full seasons and took a 2-1 series lead, Durant was again at the front of things, getting buckets in such variety that, as the game grew into a blowout, it seemed as if he were not so much competing against Golden State as performing a top-to-bottom maintenance check on his own talent.

Durant is back at the center of the basketball world for the first stretch since this time two years ago. Back then, he was fresh off an MVP award and on his way to losing to the eventual champion Spurs in the playoffs. He missed all the consequential parts of the next season with complications from a broken bone in his foot, and that season turned out to be a change-heavy one for the NBA. It saw the relocation of LeBron James, the rise of Steph Curry and the Warriors, and the near-universal adoption across the league of a doctrine grounded in ball movement, spacing, and three-point shooting.

Exciting as it is, then, to have Durant back in his old form, it is also a little strange. His current run doesn't refute everything that happened while he was gone so much as ignore it. Durant looks like he stepped into a cryogenic freezer after that playoff loss to San Antonio—not all that long ago, generally speaking, but deep history in the context of the league's current evolution—and stepped out of it, none the worse for wear, last week. He's playing as if whatever discoveries were made while he was gone are invalid, because he wasn't there to vet them. There's something disorienting about that; we've taught ourselves to equate precision cutting and passing with basketball excellence, which casts Durant's postseason bombing runs as something of a rebuttal. What's more disorienting: he might be right.

Durant scored 33 points and grabbed eight rebounds in just three quarters on Sunday, but a pair of plays, which covered a combined 10 seconds of game play and 150 feet of court space, do a better job of registering his impact than even that impressive stat line. The first came near the end of the second quarter, when the Thunder were starting to pull away. Durant sealed off the rim against a Draymond Green drive, stretching his hands up to the backboard square, and gathered Green's miss. Then he was off, gliding down the court in five dribbles, pulling up, and canning a three. The second happened midway through the third, when he pinned a Harrison Barnes layup against the glass, started the other way, and looped a pass to Westbrook for a layup.

Durant isn't known as a defender—after nine years in the league, he remains branch-thin, more comfortable using his length to get shots off than to impede them—but those two plays were somehow characteristic. He has a position along the axes of scale and tempo that's unique in basketball history, and so much of the joy of watching him is the result of the singular possibilities this opens.

At nearly seven feet tall, Durant moves like that of someone six inches shorter, so even the plays we've seen him make a thousand times look, on each new viewing, like some kind of spatial illusion. He performs the same crossover dribble any guard might, but he is all of a sudden across the court when he does it. He takes his two steps before a layup and manages to snake through an entire defense on the trip. Even the simple act of a jump shot is dizzying, as he snatches up his dribble and gets in the air in a blink. What his speed doesn't accomplish, his size does; the defender's hand rarely reaches past his chin.

This all has a simplifying effect. When he's gotten going, as he has been during these playoffs, Durant needs less help than anyone else in the game. Recent trends encourage us to see this as a weakness; "hero ball" is out of vogue, overtaken in the public imagination by a in which star power is soldered seamlessly to a team approach. Curry and James, in this context, are the vanguard, each leveraging their own advantages into team-wide opportunity. Westbrook is a counterpunching aspirant; in mid-game adjustments and postgame comments, you can sense him gauging how best to apply his energies.

Durant does not do any of that. Instead of matching a defense's complex scheming with his own, he reduces basketball to a series of either-ors. Press up on him, he glides by. Lay back, he lets go of that easy jumper. Body him up to keep him from curling around those pin-down screens that start so many Oklahoma City sets, and he darts the other way, catches a pass, and drops in a floater from the middle of the lane.

The genius, here, is of a different sort than the type we've come to expect. It's not really ideological, or diagrammable. It is resolutely individual. It arrives not in 48-minute treatises but in flashes of impossibility—those moments when Durant wriggles away from the normal scrum of the game, gets in the air, and makes shapes that nobody else has ever been able to make. In this latest iteration, it is also refreshingly self-assured; where the Warriors exult in their harmony, Durant shoulders up to Waiters and delivers a half-smirking "fuck you," letting his teammate stand in for anyone who might aspire to bother him (or hesitate to pass him the ball).

The reputation of his approach, going forward, will depend on these next few games against the Warriors. If Golden State turns the series around, it will be taken as proof of the superiority of balance, and a reminder that the revolution will continue to be televised as scheduled. If the Thunder hold on, it will be a credit to the old, egoist, virtuoso-driven basketball. Either way, it's nothing but good to have Durant back at the NBA forefront. So much changed during his short time away, but nothing about him has changed a bit.