Kevin Durant doesn’t care about minutes: ‘My basketball life is not that long’
Kevin Durant has an answer for those who think he’s playing too many minutes: He doesn’t care.
Durant played 40 minutes in the Nets’ 112-110 win over the Knicks on Tuesday. He has played in every Nets game except one this season and has played in both sets of back-to-back games to date.
Durant, however, said he still had eight minutes left in the tank.
“I’m a basketball player. I enjoy to play. I wanna play for 48 minutes. That’s just what it is,” he said after the game. “And I know a lot of people ― I don’t even know if they’re concerned or not. It’s just a conversation to have: I’m playing more minutes and I’m coming off an injury and all this other stuff, but I like to play, and if I can convince coach to play me the whole second half sometimes and put me in earlier in quarters, I’m gonna do it.
“It don’t matter. My basketball life is not that long, so I’m gonna get the most out of it.”
Durant said has an ongoing campaign with Steve Nash to get his head coach to play him as many minutes as possible. The campaign was successful, Durant said, in the Nets’ loss to the Phoenix Suns, when he convinced Nash to play him the entire second half.
“Tonight he just threw me in earlier in the fourth,” Durant said. “I didn’t ask him but I’m sure for the rest of the season, I’ll try to sneak some of those 40- plus-minute games in, but s—t, I like being out there.”
Nash said the Nets play Durant this many minutes out of necessity: Without Kyrie Irving, whose 27 points, six assists and five rebounds per game vanished alongside his eligibility after his decision not to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the Nets are without one of their most aggressive scorers. The scoring has been even more difficult to come by with sharpshooter Joe Harris out likely another four-to-eight weeks after undergoing surgery to remove a bone particle from his left ankle.
There will always be concern with Durant. He suffered a ruptured Achilles in the 2019 NBA Finals, the most devastating injury to befall a professional basketball player. He also battled hamstring and thigh injuries last season, though on a far lesser scale.
That injured past isn’t deterring Durant from shouldering the load his team needs him to carry if they’re going to finish the season strong and realize their goals of winning a championship at the end of the year.
“It’s not ideal to have him have such a burden, but I don’t know what options we have other than to play him less and lose more,” Nash said. “He’s a great player, and we’re down a great player (Irving) and a really good player (Harris) and a few others (Nic Claxton — ill). So I don’t know if we have the luxury right now. Hopefully, the season gives us opportunities.
“We had one recently with the shoulder where he didn’t play for four days, so that lessened the blow and allowed him to kind of regenerate, but he’s going to have a lot of responsibility. That’s just the way it is, and when we can, we try to give him a reprieve.”
