What fueled Kevin Durant's incredible return to the game
KEVIN DURANT HEARD the pop in his right leg over the roar of nearly 20,000 fans inside Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Then he collapsed to the floor, holding his leg, pinching his heel.
It was the second quarter of Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals. As Durant sat there, a member of the Golden State Warriors, memories from his basketball career flashed before his eyes. Fearing the end of his career, or one that seemed recognizable, he gazed around the court and into the crowd, trying to soak up a final moment.
When he was helped to the locker room, Durant's foot didn't feel fully attached. Then, a doctor performed what's known as a Thompson Test to determine the integrity of the Achilles tendon, an essential band of tissue that helps connect calf muscles to the heel. Patients lie face down, with their feet hanging off the edge of a table or a bed, and a doctor squeezes the calf to see if the foot moves. If it doesn't, then that tendon is likely torn.
Inside the room, the doctor squeezed Durant's right calf -- nothing moved. The doctor looked around at other specialists, at nearby Warriors officials who looked on. The room fell silent. Doubt soon crept in. "This is career-ending, I'm done," Durant recalled thinking. Even if he came back, maybe he'd only average 15 points a game, maybe a few more -- maybe.
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"That's what I was thinking," he told ESPN, "because that's all I was hearing, that this s--- is over."
The events of five years ago still serve as a flashbulb memory for Durant. He remembers them vividly.
What followed in the weeks, months and years ahead -- a series of tedious milestones, starting with learning to walk again, learning to run again, learning to jump again -- represent an unheralded aspect of Durant's Hall of Fame career: an unrelenting burn to return not just to the player he was, but to one more efficient and effective than before. Each milestone felt momentous and hard-won, and this season, Durant reached another, when he played 75 regular-season games, his first time playing that many since 2018-19.
Now, in his second season with the Phoenix Suns, down 2-0 in the first round of the playoffs to the Minnesota Timberwolves, Durant will be called upon to help save a teetering season, with Game 3 coming Friday night in Phoenix (10:30 p.m. ET, ESPN).
SUNS OWNER MAT ISHBIA went all-in for Durant in February 2023, sending Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, four first-round draft picks and a 2028 first-round pick swap to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for the star swingman. Then, a few months later, the Suns dealt for star guard Bradley Beal.
With their new Big Three of Durant, Beal and star shooting guard Devin Booker, the Suns seemed poised for championship contention, but injuries and uneven play have interfered. Through it all, Durant has been the constant, averaging 27.1 points in 37.2 minutes this season, during which he made his 14th NBA All-Star appearance.
Sitting inside the Target Center in Minneapolis, Durant folded his 6-foot-11 frame into a chair and discussed this latest milestone on his journey. The stands were empty, practice had ended and most of his Suns teammates had departed back to the team hotel.
He had worked so hard to get back, he had felt like his old self by the 2021 playoffs, he said. But then a series of nagging injuries -- slipping on the court, or players falling into him -- kept him sidelined.
"I felt like I would've played 75 games the past two years, to be honest," Durant said.
As he spoke, he offered a window into an aspect of him that those around Durant describe as rare, if not wholly unique: an obsession and love for the game so intense that they alone carried him through the darkness of an injury that had robbed him of so many weeks, months, years.
"There are very few who love the game as much as KD," Suns general manager James Jones told ESPN. "You don't play this long and that well unless you love it. You can't fake that fire."
Jones paused. "That's what I want to say," he reiterated. "You can't fake that fire."
Back inside the increasingly quiet Target Center, Durant continued to reflect.
He was 30 when his Achilles ruptured, well in his prime. He is now 35, in the winter of his career with a couple wisps of gray dotting his goatee. During Game 1 of this first-round series against Minnesota, 22-year-old Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards barked at Durant after sinking a series of jumpers over him, and social media accounts tracking their exchange alleged that, among other things, Edwards called Durant "old." By NBA standards, a literally fair assessment. After all, Durant was drafted and played for a team that no longer exists: the Seattle Supersonics.
Durant looked out at the court.
"It was a long process, man," he said.
ANDY BARR WAS living in Los Angeles in the fall of 2019 when he received the call.
Durant had undergone surgery to repair his Achilles tendon almost immediately after it snapped. And a couple of months after that, the Nets, whom Durant had joined that summer, asked Barr to start working with Durant.
By then, in 2019, Barr served as a physiotherapist to help professional athletes recover from injury. It was a subject he knew well; a major knee injury derailed his own career as a professional soccer player in England. After that, he shifted his focus toward helping players, first in soccer -- including for Manchester City -- and later joining the New York Knicks, where he worked for six years as a director of performance and rehabilitation from 2009 to 2015.
Barr had worked with players across all sports who had suffered catastrophic injuries, including rupturing an Achilles tendon, and he knew how challenging, both physically and mentally, it could be to recover.
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After all, Achilles tears have long cleaved professional sporting careers -- from what a player was, to what the injury reduced them to, the gap often hauntingly wide.
Because of that dynamic, Barr said that much of his job during the rehabilitation process surrounds managing those anxieties: What if I don't heal right? What if I'm never the same? What if I'm never good again? What if my career is over? What else am I going to do with my life?
Those nagging questions can hinder a player's progress through the mind-numbing days of rehabilitation, repeatedly performing menial exercises, rebuilding strength toward a return date that might never exist.
"It's tough," Barr told ESPN. "You've really got to be there for them during that process."
DURANT IMMEDIATELY STRUCK Barr as being different.
"It was incredible," Barr said. "From day one, he was just ultimately focused and determined to get back."
But it was far from easy -- or immediate.
"I don't want to say I was depressed, because depression is its own thing, but whatever is under depression," Durant said. "There was something mentally that was going on. That's a dark place. We all think we're these god-like beings. I couldn't tell the future. I didn't know what the f--- was next. I didn't know how I was going to look or feel or play."
He thought of Kobe.
"When Kobe went through his, I just thought, 'There's no f---ing way that Superman tore his Achilles," Durant said. "You never think it could happen to players like Kobe Bryant or even to me. It's just such a career-ending injury."
Durant relied on Barr and other specialists to put his racing mind at ease.
For four years, the two worked together, with Barr, whom the Nets hired as a consulting physiotherapist, taking a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York almost every week -- leaving on a Sunday night and returning to L.A. on Fridays. Depending on the team schedule, they'd work together nine-to-five on some days but 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. on others.
Durant never missed a day.
"Nothing was ever like, 'I'm going to bulls--- around,'" Barr said. "He just goes out there with pure purpose."
"My whole being has been committed to playing basketball. I didn't think it was time yet. It's that simple," Durant said. "And when I'm that committed to something, I didn't even think about anything else but, like, when are we starting recovery? As soon as it happened, everybody wanted to cry with me. I did that for a second, crying, because everybody else was crying, and then I'm like, 'When are we doing surgery? When can I start my recovery process?' And that's how it was, man. I'm ready to get back, quick."
It was refreshing, Barr said, if unusual, especially for a player of that caliber. He had worked with some players, even stars, and he had to convince them to do certain exercises, to show effort, to care. And Barr would think to himself, "Why the hell do I have to convince you to do something to get better?" But he would explain something to Durant, and Durant would respond, almost robotically: "OK, how many sets and repetitions?" Then, he'd execute them.
"He's so self-motivated," Barr said. "It was amazing. He just makes my job so easy."
They talked about life beyond basketball. "He was teaching me about his world," Durant said. "I was teaching him about the mentality of basketball players." The goal was to help Durant return to his former state but also become more purposeful with how he moved.
It was an education.
"I was working with the [resistance] bands," Durant said, crouching down as if they were still placed on the outside of his legs, "and the first thing I was doing movement-wise, I would jump off a box, get into a stance with bands
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