Kevin Durant is having himself a pretty good season, yeah? Whether or not he ends up winning the MVP--and I'd be pretty shocked if he didn't at this point--he's got himself a final stat line that will be somewhere around 32 points a game (the easy scoring champ and the highest PPG for any player in eight years), 7.4 rebounds per game and five assists per game with near-50/40/90 shooting splits. This is all while being the best player on the team with the second-best-overall record, who missed their second-best player for nearly half the season. Just about any line item you could want on an MVP resume, KD's got bolded in caps lock.
But when you talk about ranking Durant's season in historical terms, among some of the all-time greats, in my mind there's only one piece of evidence that needs citing: KD becoming only the fifth-ever member of the NBA's prestigious 30/30 club.
With the possible exception of the 50/40/90 club, there are no cool single-season clubs in basketball. Baseball obviously has its own 30/30 and 40/40 clubs, hockey has 50-goal and 100-point benchmarks and throwing for 5000 yards used to be a pretty big deal in football. Unless you're part of the club-of-one that's averaged 50 points per game (Chamberlain) or a triple-double for a whole year (Robertson), basketball doesn't usually put much of a premium on any particular numbers in discussions of single-season accomplishments. In the NBA more than any other pro sport, you have to look at the entirety of a player's stat profile to start to get a sense of how meaningful their season really was.
But the 30/30 club--which I'm pretty sure I just invented, though it's a basic-enough concept that I wouldn't be shocked if someone else had it before me--basically speaks for itself. Simply put, it's the club for any player who's ever averaged 30 points per game in a season while also posting a Player Efficiency Rating (PER) over 30.
I'm a big fan of the idea of the 30/30 Club, because it creates a single-season ideal that balances volume with efficiency, conventional stats with advanced stats, the obvious superficial dominance with the deeper supremacy. Most importantly, there's no absolutely way to cheat your way to a 30/30 season--you can't do it as a volume shooter or stat compiler, and you can't do it by picking your spots and just playing your role. You can only do it by being completely awesome all the time.
Going for 30/30 in the NBA might not seem like that big a deal in a historical sense, since it seems like most seasons there's at least one player who gets each side of that slash, but it's actually pretty rare. It's only been done by four players so far in NBA history and those four players have combined to do it a total of nine times, with the most recent example coming in Dwyane Wade's post-Olympics 2008-09 comeback season (30.2 PPG, 30.4 PER).
Before we delve into Durant's likely entry, some interesting facts about the other members and non-members of the 30/30 Club.
- The first player to ever do it was Wilt Chamberlain, who did it in three consecutive seasons for the Philadelphia-then-San-Francisco Warriors, from '61 to '64. Over those three seasons, Wilt also set the records for all-time PPG (50.4, '61-'62) and all-time PER (31.8, '62-'63), and also posted the highest Win Shares total (25.0, '63-'64) of any 30/30 season.
- The player with the most 30/30 seasons to his name is, unsurprisingly, Michael Jordan, who pulled off the incredible feat of posting four consecutive 30/30 seasons from '88 to '91, with a PPG over 32 and a PER over 31 in each of them. Over this stretch MJ won all four scoring titles, but only won the MVP twice, losing to Magic Johnson for the two middle seasons.
- The final yet-to-be-mentioned member of the 30/30 Club would also probably be the hardest for a casual NBA fan to guess: Tracy McGrady, in his historically underrated 2002-03 season with the Orlando Magic. That year, Tracy put up 32.1 PPG with a 30.3 PER, but with a supporting cast consisting of Pat Garrity, Darrell Armstrong, Mike Miller, a perpetually injured Grant Hill and a quickly ancient Shawn Kemp. T-Mac finished just fourth in the MVP voting and the Magic got bounced by Detroit in the first round.
- Though Dwyane Wade makes the 30/30 cut, you'll notice a rather conspicuously absent name from the list: Wade's teammate (and KD's sole MVP competition) LeBron James. Though LeBron has managed a 30+ PER in four seasons, only once has he averaged 30 a game, for the '08 Cavs team that completely retooled halfway through the season and lost to the Celtics in the second round. That year, LeBron's PER was a measly, pathetic, league-leading 29.1. This year, LBJ falls short on both sides, with a 27.1 PPG and a 29.1 PER.
- Other NBA notables to approach but never reach 30/30: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (came a tenth of a PER point away in '71-'72), Larry Bird (closest was 29.9/27.8 in '87-'88), Kobe Bryant (two PER points short in his 35.4 PPG '05-'06 season), Shaquille O'Neal (0.3 PPG away in his '99-'00 MVP season--never averaged 30 in a season, incredibly) and both Moses and Karl Malone (both averaged 30 in a season but never the 30+ PER). David Robinson also came two-tenths of a point away from 30/30 in his MVP season of '93-'94.
So long story short, that's some pretty damn elite company Durant would be joining in the 30/30 club. They'd thumb their noses at the SNL Five-Timers, for sure.
His presence in the club is not yet a sure thing, though. The scoring is good as got--Durant currently sits at 32.1 PPG with two games to go, and he'd have to figure out a way to score negative points (and lots of them) in his next two games to even have a chance of getting back under 30. The PER, however, is dangling over a more precarious precipice at 30.1. Even late in the season PER can still swing a tenth of a point or two pretty easily, and when you're in such a high strata of the rating, it's a lot easier to lose said tenths than it is to gain them.
And unlike with PPG or most other stats, you can't just say "Well, here's how much of [x] Durant needs to secure the PER." Player Efficiency Rating measures just about everything, with a formula I could barely begin to self-compute, so there's any number of ways KD could improve or lessen that number over his final two contests. And that's kind of the cool thing about PER as far as this club is concerned--the only way he can ensure that his number stays above 30 at season's end is to go out and have two really, really good games this week.
Of course, in most similar situations, you'd wonder why Durant would even play the final two games at all. Not because he wants to protect his 30/30 entry--it's a cool club and all, but it's not exactly Ted Williams risking his .400 season in '41--but because the Thunder don't have a ton to play for. They're out of reach of the No. 1 seed and have a magic number of one to clinch the No. 2 seed. You'd think they could handle either the starter-less Pelicans or the down-for-the-count Pistons to clinch, if not both, without Durant, but according to reports, coach Scott Brooks has no plans to rest his star forward, letting KD play out the string.
It's good news for us, though. In addition to all of the races of actual consequence going on over the final week of the NBA's regular season, for playoff seeding if not outright entry, we now have Durant's 30/30 club status as a subplot of interest to monitor before everything wraps. Two good games against the NBA's worst competition is all that separates Kevin Durant from entry into one of the most exclusive memberships in league history. Think KD can manage? Tune in--and then check Basketball-Reference the next morning--to find out.
