We’re well past the point of finding out about basketball feats of greatness or folly via word of mouth. If it happened on a court, no matter how grainy or shaky, someone’s recording it and posting it on Youtube.
Unless it’s a Powerade commercial, video’s indisputable and sheds sunlight on performances where eye-witness accounts either fall short or overexaggerate. And fortunately, there’s great video evidence of Kevin Durant‘s 66-point performance at the Rucker League last night–a mid-summer reminder of why we keep watching this game.
Kevin Durant’s performance created an evening for the ages at Rucker Park. The Oklahoma City Thunder All-Star shook off a slow start and poured in an astounding 66 points to lead DC Power to a 99-93 win over the Sean Bell All-Stars in front of a standing-room only crowd at the Entertainers Basketball Classic on Monday night at streetball’s most famous park. Durant, who led the NBA in scoring last season, connected on 9-of-11 3-pointers, including five straight from well beyond NBA range, early in the fourth quarter. The 6-foot-9 forward was mobbed on the court by fans standing along the sidelines after a fifth straight trey.“I always wanted to play in Rucker Park all my life,” Durant said in a postgame interview with park emcee Hannibal.
True to the culture, there are reams of video clips from this performance; including a variety of angles, points of view, various video lengths, etc. The video below captures the temperature from the ground floor:
It’s one thing to read Staszewski’s account, but the video goes a step further and communicates the raw emotion and energy on the court and in the crowd; as well as communicating Durant’s frightening height advantage over his opponents.
I think we all prefer to at least have the option to see what’s really happening instead of reading or hearing about it second-hand from a friend who’s prone to embellishment. In the process of using video to document every notable event, we lose some of the mystique and fairytale elements that draw us to sports. A perfect example is the often-discussed, but (conveniently) never-seen scrimmage among the members of the 1992 USA Dream Team. Magic vs. Michael, accompanied by the greatest supporting casts in the history of the basketball playing world. Anyone who saw this scrimmage or even heard about it believes it was one of the greatest basketball games ever played, but only a handful of eyeballs were privileged to witness it. There’s a divine and mythical quality to it that verifiable performances like Durant’s 66 at Rucker or LeBron’s 4th quarter evisceration of the Pistons in the 2007 playoffs are lacking.
This isn’t the death of storytelling or personal experience and I’m not an advocate of personal interpretation over truth. It’s sad that we’re running out of these unseen moments, but our need to see and share every event is overwhelming and I’m far from one to impede obvious progress in favor of nostalgia. The dark flipside to this is the infamous, uncatchable Twitter hacker and the trend of athlete junk floating around the internets, but that’s another sad story for another slow day.
Dancing With Noah 