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Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant was only two points away from continuing his legendary 20-point game streak, after being taken out with 5:50 left in the fourth quarter of Thursday night's 125-101 win against the Denver Nuggets.
Had Durant succeeded in reaching 20 points, he would have surpassed Michael Jordan‘s mark of 72 consecutive games with that scoring output.
Durant had 14 points to start the fourth quarter and went 2-of-5 in a six-minute, 10-second stretch to get to 18 points before being taken out for good by head coach Steve Kerr.
When asked about his decision to take him out so early, Kerr was firm to his convictions.
“I knew about it,” Kerr told reporters. “I knew about the streak and I told him that when he came off the court, but I'm not gonna mess with the basketball gods. If you wanna leave a guy out there to get some kind of record, then you're asking for an injury.”
“The game called for him to come out. He came out, he had no problem with it.”
The Warriors caught a lot of flack for chasing records last year, and even this year as Stephen Curry broke the record for most three-pointers made in a game, so this might be Kerr's way of saying that this team is focused on winning and coming together rather than going after personal accolades.
In this way, basketball ironically works differently than baseball, where if a manager takes a pitcher out when he has a chance to throw a no-hitter, the skipper is automatically villainized.
Kerr is right in the sense that every minute a player is out on the court, they are risking some sort of injury – it's just the nature of the beast. Taking him out in a 20-plus-point blowout was the safe coaching move to make.
While we might never know how Durant really feels about his streak ending, the reset button always helps a team focus and stay at the task at hand.
The next task on the Warriors book will be the Phoenix Suns on Sunday at 5 p.m. PT.
