[King Glorious]

My feeling is still that he's going to be a guy that gets you 20-23 a night for his career and nothing else. He may even get it up to the 25-26 a night range. As I said, there is nothing wrong with that at all. But there are a lot of guys that could do that in his situation. Rashard Lewis got them 22 a night playing with Ray Allen but gave them nothing else. No defense. No rebounding. No passing. Nothing else. My issue with Durant is that he's strictly a perimeter player. People looked at his rebounding numbers and assumed he was also an inside player and he's just not. He's an athletic player and he dominated guys that he was better than in college but he doesn't have those same physical advantages in the NBA. I think that the expecations for Durant were that he could come in and would be a guy that could get you 28 a night right off the bat, along with maybe 7-8 boards. Perhaps the expectations were unrealistic to begin with. But I don't think that 19 a night and 39% shooting and around four boards a night are what was expected of him. I discount all the comparisons to past players and what they did at his age, especially going further back. Kobe Bryant was straight out of high school and at 19, even though he was in his second season, he wasn't a starter. He played 79 games that year and only started one. He was playing behind Eddie Jones, who was an all-star at the time. Shaquille O'Neal was also on that team so Bryant was never the first scoring option on that team. LeBron was also straight out of high school. A lot of people like to look at the whole age thing and compare where people rank at the same ages. I hate every time I hear them compare what Kobe has done at certain ages to what Jordan had done at that same age. It's not accurate. I like to judge it by comparing guys at the same point in terms of NBA experience. The comparison to LeBron at 19 is better because they were the same age and both in their first year, although Durant does have the advantage in that he had a year of college under his belt and I do think that his experience with the Olympic team gave him even more of an advantage coming in. The key to judging Durant will be to see how he improves once he's got a real feel for the game. Notice how LeBron's numbers went way up in his second year. See how Kobe's improved once he was moved to a starter and had some experience. I want to see how Durant does before I say he didn't reach expectations. It's my feeling though that he'll end up being just like a Rashard Lewis or a Loul Deng or Richard Jefferson or a Jason Richardson or a Richard Hamilton. A guy that can consistently get you 20-25 but very little else. A guy that's a fringe all-star player but not the future hall of famer that many thought he'd be coming out.