LILLE, France — Watch Kevin Durant the next time he takes the floor for Team USA this Olympics. He lurks. He prowls. He waits. And then he strikes, without mercy and without stopping. As long as he’s on your side, it’s pretty damn cool to behold.
Yes, the Slim Reaper is back. Durant, already the United States’ career Olympic scoring leader, added to his international legend Sunday evening. Playing in his first game since the playoffs thanks to a lingering calf injury, Durant poured in 21 first-half points to help the United States shut down a frenetic Serbian offense and claim a 110-84 win in its first game of the 2024 Olympics.
“Maybe more than any player I’ve ever been around, when he comes back from a long absence, you don’t notice it,” Team USA head coach Steve Kerr said after the game. “I mean, he’s so skilled, and he just looked like he was in mid-season form after not playing in a real basketball game for a couple of months. Pretty incredible.”
Durant sat out Team USA’s entire Olympic exhibition run, and now it doesn’t look so much like a coincidence that they happened to struggle mightily over those five games. His appearance late in the first quarter was a timely one, helping settle a U.S. team that initially struggled to contain the whirling Serbian attack led by three-time and defending NBA MVP Nikola Jokić.
“He’s an impossible cover,” Kerr said. “The strength of our team is our depth, and we’re going to — we’ve got three guys who can guard him. And that was the approach, just rotate guys onto him and cross your fingers because he’s a brilliant player.”
For a team full of its own MVPs and NBA champions, the United States looked awfully rattled early in the first quarter of its first Olympic game. Kerr ran out a starting lineup of LeBron James, Steph Curry, Devin Booker, Joel Embiid and Jrue Holiday, and that esteemed crew almost immediately got itself into trouble.