Kevin Durant has bad vibes

How you rated 27 historically great NBA players from best "vibes" to worst.

There’s more to come on Silver Bulletin soon, including tips on playing the World Series of Poker and a reflection on the politics of the summer of 2020 and the “are you better off than you were four years ago?” question. I also need to take some time to prepare the presidential model, which launches next month for paid subscribers. To sign up for all of the fun, just use the link below.

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After the Phoenix Suns lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves — the embarrassing finale to Kevin Durant’s second exit by first-round playoff sweep in three seasons — I had an idea: I’d finally write my Kevin-Durant-is-overrated column.

I planned to defend this heresy by citing advanced stats like RAPTOR and EPM that view Durant as a step below the “MVP conversation” level of NBA player. Durant is an extraordinary scorer, especially in the half-court, and that is the single most valuable and vaunted NBA skill. But the advanced metrics notice that he’s only slightly above-average on defense, a mediocre rebounder, and can be a bit of a ball-stopper. Plus, he has trouble staying on the court. The scoring is still enough to make him, say, the 8th or 10th or 12th best player in the league — but not to put him in the top 3 to 5. And that makes a big difference. The Suns acquired Durant at the 2023 deadline at a price that you’d pay for a transcendent, mid-career superstar. But Durant hasn’t made an All-NBA first team since 2018.

But then at my home poker game last week, Durant’s name came up, and it was clear that I was hardly the only person to hold this opinion. In fact, everyone thought Durant was overrated — so I actually found myself serving as his devil’s advocate. No, he’s not washed up yet. (He’s coming off a 27.1/6.6/5.0 season on extremely efficient shooting and even managed to stay healthy for 75 games.) Yes, I’d want him on the Knicks. (Assuming the price was reasonable, which it wouldn’t be.)

Of course, that’s the problem with “X is overrated” hot takes: the moment it becomes a fashionable opinion is the moment it becomes self-canceling. This is where the phrase “so overrated he’s underrated” comes from, although I don’t know that KD is there quite yet.

What I can say, though, is that the views expressed about Durant in my poker game are now widely held by other NBA fans, or at least a cross-section of fans who follow me on Twitter. I conducted a series of Twitter polls¹ on 27 historic NBA players. Specifically, these were the top 25 players from The Athletic’s 2022 NBA 75 list, plus Nikola Jokić (who would surely be on the list if The Athletic updated it today) and Chris Paul (whom advanced metrics regard as chronically underrated). I asked my followers to rate each player’s “vibes”, defined thusly:

For a post I'm working on: I'm interested in what you think of a series of 27 historic NBA players' "vibes". This is deliberately subjective. Use whatever criteria you want, including: leadership, iconicness, historical importance, being a winner, charisma and likability.

The idea here is to tease out the difference between “objective” and “subjective” evaluations of NBA players. I put those terms in scare quotes because the distinctions are sometimes blurry — some vibes-y qualities like clutch performance now are being quantified.

But enough with making this glorified listicle sound too high-minded. Here is how you rated these 27 players, from worst vibes to best. In parenthesis next to each player is his Vibe Score, which I calculated by averaging your votes from the Twitter polls as follows:

• “Great vibes” = 100 points

• “Good vibes” = 67 points

• “Mediocre vibes” = 33 points

• “Bad vibes” = 0 points

There was a strong consensus on many players — you handed out Vibe Scores ranging all the way from 30.4 to 88.5. I’ll keep the top player’s identity a secret for now. But I’m ready to reveal the player in possession of that downright chilly number, who is —

27. Karl Malone (30.4)

Yikes. The Mailman was the only guy for whom a plurality of voters assigned bad vibes. And maybe that’s because you can critique him from nearly any angle. He’s played the most playoff games, 193, of any player never to win a championship. His style of play hasn’t aged very well. His two MVP awards were probably undeserved. There’s always been something profoundly uncool about the Utah Jazz. And Malone was accused of impregnating a 13-year-old when he was a 20-year-old college sophomore.

26. Chris Paul (37.7)

Paul is 6th all time (!) in basketball-reference.com Win Shares. So why is he rated nowhere near that high on subjective lists? (The Athletic had him at #30 in 2022.) This is why: it’s because people think he has bad vibes. And I think it’s sort of unfair. Like Malone, CP3 has never won a championship, although he did once have a reputation for being a good clutch player. Maybe it’s that he’s played for five franchises in the past eight seasons. Maybe it’s the untimely injuries. Paul just seems to have a little bit of a raincloud perpetually over his head — and that’s sort of the definition of bad vibes, I guess. He’s a great player and a literal off-court leader, having served for 8 years as the head of the Players Association, so I hope his vibes will recalibrate at some point.

25. Kevin Durant (41.0)

And here’s KD. Of the bottom five players in Vibe Score, four never won a ring. Durant, of course, is the exception, even having been named Finals MVP after both of his Warriors title runs. He is obviously not getting full credit for those titles from the voters — for the obvious reason that he joined a Golden State team that had just gone 73-9 the year prior.

But I think this full-scale implosion in his reputation is more recent. Durant ranked #13 on The Athletic’s all-time list three seasons ago — ahead of #15 Stephen Curry!² — but that was before three more disasters from a vibes/narrative standpoint. Both Brooklyn and Phoenix have consistently been regarded as championship contenders during KD’s tenure there. And they’ve consistently found new ways to disappoint and infuriate those who believed in them — or bet on them — from KD’s foot-on-the-line against the Bucks, to Kyrie Irving’s refusal to be vaccinated, to the Suns not owning their own first round pick until 2031 and yet still not making it out of the first round. Not all of that is KD’s fault exactly — but he’s got a bit of the Chris Paul Raincloud Syndrome.

24. John Stockton (44.5)

Remember how I said that CP3 ranks 6th all-time in Win Shares? Well, John Stockton ranks 7th. They’re similar players, and the advanced metrics tend to put more weight on their hallmarks — assists, steals and efficient shooting — than the average NBA fan does. Unlike Paul, Stockton played his entire career in one place — but since it was Utah, his and Karl Malone’s reputation as perpetual bridesmaids don‘t help. For what it’s worth, Stockton also became a big anti-vax/mask/lockdown guy during COVID — something my politics-heavy Twitter followers are likely to be more sensitive about than most NBA watchers.

23. Elgin Baylor (56.7)

Not much to say here. Baylor, whose career ended in 1972, is probably the least well-known of these players, and that’s reflected in how 84 percent of voters defaulted to giving him a rating in one of the middle two categories, “good” or “mediocre”. Our next pick is a wee bit more polarizing —

22. Kobe Bryant (59.0)

Bryant’s Vibe Score had the largest standard deviation of any player: 31 percent of voters said he had great vibes, while another 39 percent said bad or mediocre vibes. And it’s not hard to see why. It’s a life that includes five NBA titles, various stints as the league’s most popular player, and a tragic death in a helicopter crash — but also sexual assault allegations, just one MVP, and a reputation that has somewhat diminished in the advanced analytics era. (The advanced stats find Kobe’s 12 All-Defensive Team selections questionable and ding him for his merely-good scoring efficiency.)

21. Moses Malone (62.5)

Malone’s peak is just on the wrong side of the Bird-Magic Line that canonically marks the beginning of the “modern” NBA — a line established in part by middle-aged guys like me whose first memories of the league date back to the mid-80s. True, Malone continued playing until 1995 (!) but his MVPs came in 1979, 1982 and 1983, so a lot of the vibes we experienced were like — who’s this old guy, was he really a big deal? Indeed, Malone was a big deal: one of just eight players to win 3+ MVPs, the first player to go directly from high school to professional basketball, and the league’s fifth all-time leading rebounder.

20. LeBron James (63.8)

Oof, that’s lower than I was expecting — although LeBron was the second most polarizing player after Kobe; 36.5 percent of voters gave him great vibes while another 32.6 scored them as mediocre or poor. The timing of the poll amid a first-round Lakers exit to the Denver Nuggets probably didn’t help him.

But I don’t think LeBron is ever going to reach the impeccably good vibes that Michael Jordan had. His 4-6 record in the Finals are a dumb talking point — ‘tis better to have made the Finals and lost than never to have made the Finals at all — but nonetheless something for the haters to cling to.

Really, though, I suspect there’s something deeper going on beneath the surface: James has never been effortlessly cool in the way that Jordan was. Rather, it’s all quite deliberate: you can see his gears turning. You see his insane work ethic and you see him working the refs and working his general managers . You see the brand management: instead of “I’m back” — Jordan’s two-word statement announcing his return to the league — you got The Decision. Most of this is good business. It has certainly made LeBron incredibly wealthy — he’s a literal billionaire, and I’d buy stock in LeBron’s future net worth. But it doesn’t make him beloved, at least outside of Northern Ohio.

19. Jerry West (64.0)

This relatively low rating makes sense, I guess. I’m not sure how much of it is people not having any memory of West as a player, versus knowing that he went 1-8 in the NBA Finals, versus his unflattering portrayal in “Winning Time”.

18. Kevin Garnett (66.6)

As you’ll see, this is a much lower rating than Garnett’s contemporary Dirk Nowitzki even though their careers had somewhat similar shapes — with one late-career title each — and Garnett was pretty clearly the better player by advanced stats. But his contributions were mainly on defense whereas Dirk’s were on offense and, well, fans dig the scoreboard stats. And Garnett is caustic, sarcastic, intense — a personality type that isn’t for everyone.

17. Wilt Chamberlain (71.4)

Note that there’s a reasonably big gap from Garnett’s 66.6 Vibe Score to Chamberlain’s 71.4 — so we’re crossing the threshold from lukewarm vibes to pretty good ones. Perhaps that’s surprising for Chamberlain, who for years had a reputation as a player who wasn’t as much of a winner as his statistics suggested. Of course, if you have a season where you average 50.4 points per game, it’s gonna be hard to live up to those expectations unless you sweep your way to an NBA title. But Wilt did eventually win two titles with two different teams in addition to his incomparable statistics on and off-court.

16. Oscar Robertson (73.8)

Oscar’s game holds up well to modern sensibilities as a big guard with perpetual triple-double potential. This is the second- or third highest score for a player on the early side of the Bird-Magic Line, depending on whether you consider Dr. J to be a contemporary of Bird and Magic or from a slightly earlier era.

15. Giannis Antetokounmpo (74.3)

Giannis was one of the least polarizing players on the list. Almost no voter gave him bad vibes, but the plurality choice was good vibes rather than great ones. Maybe that’s because, although his downside is capped — he’s an iconic, likable player with two MVPs and a championship — it’s also reasonable to ask whether he has more to prove in the postseason. His lifetime record in playoff games he’s played in³ is just 43-36, and the Bucks have some tough decisions to make about whether to run their roster back.

14. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (76.6)

Back-to-back-to-back Bucks. This isn’t a bad score for Kareem — an outright majority of voters (52.9 percent) said he had great vibes. Still, as someone who thinks the GOAT conversation should plausibly be a three-way race between Jordan, LeBron and Kareem, I’m apparently out of step with the consensus. Abdul-Jabbar may be held back by a version of the Moses Malone problem. His best years were early with the Bucks — not later with the Lakers — in what was arguably the highest peak of all time. (Abdul-Jabbar’s 25.4 Win Shares in 1971-72 is the highest single-season total ever.) People my age remember him primarily as Magic’s sidekick, not a superstar in his own right. Plus, Kareem is a fellow Substacker (!) who may be getting dinged by conservative fans for his liberal political leanings.

13. Larry Bird (77.2)

I was born in Lansing, Michigan — also Magic Johnson’s hometown — so we rooted for the Lakers against the Celtics until the Pistons got good enough that we rooted for them against everyone. So it took me a while to be a Larry Bird appreciator. But I’ve been persuaded by advanced stats that he had a very high and well-rounded peak — shooting plus playmaking plus rebounding plus underrated defense. Although really, that’s reflected in traditional measures too — all three of Bird’s MVPs and two of his three titles came in a three-season stretch from 1984 to 1986.

Still, given Bird’s high placement on best-of-all-time lists — he was #7 in The Athletic’s ranking, for instance — and the Lakers-Celtics rivalry’s role in revitalizing the NBA, I thought he’d get a better Vibe Score. (Bird needs something to make up for a relatively short career that makes his counting stats a bit lacking — he’s only 39th all time on the NBA career scoring list, for instance.) The 80’s Celtics may be polarizing in a way that the 80’s Lakers were not, perhaps in part because of the racial undertones of the rivalry and the city of Boston.

12. David Robinson (77.4)

The Admiral has notably few haters; only 1.5 of voters gave him a bad vibes rating. He’s possibly a little underrated historically; his NBA career didn’t begin until he was 24 because he served in The Navy. And he was never quite the same after he broke his foot in 1996. But he was probably the best player in the league not named Michael Jordan for the intervening stretch of seven seasons.

11. Michael Jordan (78.4)

This is a relatively wide vibes gap between Jordan and LeBron — wide enough that I don’t particularly like LeBron’s chances to surpass Jordan as the GOAT in consensus popular opinion. Still, it’s hard to be as great as Jordan at anything and be universally beloved — and Jordan has his share of haters. So while 60.9 percent of voters gave Jordan great vibes — the fifth-highest total on the list — 7.3 percent of respondents smacked a bad vibes label on him. Maybe he’s paying the price for the ignominious performance of the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets during his ownership tenure there — or for just sort of being an asshole. I doubt he’ll be too bothered by any of this.

10. Hakeem Olajuwon (78.6)

Not quite the same career shape as Robinson — Olajuwon played considerably more seasons — but a close enough match in terms of era, position, championships (two each) and defensive dominance that it isn’t surprising they get similar ratings.

9. Tim Duncan (80.1)

Now we’re into vibes readings in the 80s, which are downright warm scores. Duncan rates well despite a reputation for lacking charisma and not having the sort of skill set that’s a lot of fun to play in a video game. But he does have five NBA titles and was the sort of player who eventually earned respect from even his rivals. Duncan’s career is more comparable to Bill Russell’s than you might think — they are the top two defensive players of all-time, according to Win Shares, and although Russell has 11 titles to Duncan’s five, Russell played in an era where there were just eight teams.

8. Nikola Jokić (80.7)

I saw my first Nuggets game in Denver last week when I got “stranded” overnight due to a missed connection⁴, and seeing him in person reminded me why first impressions are not necessarily the best impressions for the Joker. The man isn’t particularly trim, nor fleet-of-foot, nor graceful. But damn, he’s good at basketball — probably about to win his third MVP award in four seasons⁵ amid what is very much up there with the best peaks of all time.

And whatever questions remained about how his performance would hold up in the playoffs were answered last year. So the fact that Jokić is not possessed of Anthony Edwards’ athleticism or LeBron James’s fitness just makes him more relatable. These are some pretty robust vibes, in other words.

Or at least, that’s what I thought when I wrote the draft of this column before the Nuggets went down 2-0 against the Timberwolves, including getting demolished 106-80 at home on Monday night. There was a lot of skepticism about Jokić and the Nuggets before they won their title, to a degree the skeptics now conveniently forget. Is one title enough — provided you’re clearly the best player on the team and weren’t hitching yourself to someone else’s wagon — enough to give you permanent immunity from bad vibes?

7. Charles Barkley (82.1)

A very good score for a player who never won a championship, a condition that our voters otherwise treated harshly. Is it because of Barkley’s extremely funny and charismatic performances on ‘Inside the NBA’ on TNT? It’s probably mostly that; unfortunately, the show’s status is now in jeopardy as the league negotiates new rights deals.

But I’m also halfway convinced there’s a “Mandela Effect” thing going on where people mistakenly remember Barkley as having won a title when he didn’t. Barkley did win an MVP award after moving to Phoenix in 1993 and the Suns reached the Finals — but they lost to the Bulls in 6.

6. Julius Erving (82.6)

A surprise to the upside, at least for me. I just thought he was slightly on the wrong side of the Bird-Magic Line, especially since some of Dr. J’s best years came in the ABA. But I think this choice reflects well on the voters. For some highlights of Erving, I would recommend watching this ABA documentary, which is only 53 minutes long and was made long enough ago to include interviews with many of the league’s principals:

Watch those clips, and you see a thoroughly modern player — really quite LeBron-like. The ABA anticipated the playing style of today’s league far better than the NBA of the same epoch did, and Erving was its greatest star.

5. Dirk Nowitzki (82.7)

I wouldn’t have expected Dirk to be quite this high, but he has almost no haters — just 0.8 percent of voters gave him the bad vibes tag, the lowest percentage for any player on the list. So perhaps it’s no surprise that people are calling for a permanent gig for Nowitzki on ‘Inside the NBA’ after his recent guest appearance. There’s also a little bit of a Jokić factor here in a player overcoming the stereotype of a “soft” European player.

4. Magic Johnson (83.6)

Although I suppose you could punish Magic for his incredibly dull tweets, that’s just too petty a complaint for a player who is probably the best point guard of all-time, won five titles for the Showtime Lakers, returned to the league after contracting HIV and was very much a “unicorn” player in a way that anticipates the modern game.

3. Stephen Curry (84.2)

Everybody loves Steph. Even when I’ve had reasons to root against the Warriors — like, say, I was betting the other side — I’ve often found myself involuntarily pulling for him. In fact, Curry has to be most universally admired current American athlete, right? Patrick Mahomes might be close, but seems to inspire more unhinged takes than Steph does. Caitlin Clark? That’s getting too far ahead of ourselves, plus she brings out plenty of haters of her own. Shohei Ohtani? Not after whatever happened with his interpreter/degenerate gambler friend (plus he isn’t American).

Curry’s placement on historical ranking lists is also going to be interesting. He played three seasons in college and has lost two years to injury, so the raw totals aren’t as high as you might think (he’s only 30th all-time in points scored). But you can say similar things about Larry Bird, and Bird is usually ranked in the all-time top 10. If that’s the case, I think you also have to include Steph, who has one fewer MVP than Bird but one more title and has had every bit as outsized an impact on the way the game is played.

2. Shaquille O'Neal (84.9)

Now we’re seeing a pattern: if you want to improve your Vibe Score, be a panelist on ‘Inside the NBA’. But Shaq has always had good vibes, I think — from his name to his ferocious basket-breaking dunks:

He’s also a player who provides a lot of connective tissue to the NBA, with his peak spanning the arguably down period for the league between Jordan and LeBron. There are little nits you might pick — O'Neal was nomadic toward the end of his career, playing for six franchises, and he wasn’t a particularly engaged rebounder or defender after his first few seasons. But Shaq is almost literally larger than life — not someone for whom you sweat the small stuff.

1. Bill Russell (88.5)

If you ask people to rate players on the basis of qualities like leadership and historical importance, then of course Russell deserves to rate highly between 11 rings — the most all-time — and standing steadfast against frequent acts of racism. Indeed, he was the overwhelming top pick: 74.2 percent of voters said Bill Russell had great vibes.

I used to think that Russell was a little overrated statistically, but now I’m not so sure. His defensive contributions must have been insane: consider that, in 1960-61, the Celtics finished 57-22 despite having the worst offensive rating in the league because their Russell-led defense was so tenacious.

Everyone’s vibe score in one chart, and a closing thought on Durant

Would you rather have just seen the scores in a chart rather than read 3,700 words about these players? Well, it’s too late for that now. But here’s the chart, including a breakdown of the different categories of votes for each player. The (SD) column stands for standard deviation — a higher SD means there was more disagreement about a player.

Are KD’s bad vibes salvageable? I’m not sure. But a title would help a lot, particularly if Durant didn’t seem too mercenary about it. If I were his agent, here’s the advice I’d give him: demand a trade back to Oklahoma City.

See, I was going to say that it would help Durant to win a title on a team where he was clearly the best player — like, I don’t know, the Atlanta Hawks. Durant definitely wouldn’t be the best player on the Thunder — that’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. (He might be only a season or two removed from Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren lapping him also.) But it would be a sympathetic cause, since Durant’s career originated with the franchise. KD for Josh Giddey, Cason Wallace, and 2 or 3 picks? Let’s make it happen.

1. No, they’re not scientific polls, but they’re fun.

2. It doesn’t help Durant’s reputation either that Curry won another championship in 2022 without him.

3. Meaning, not counting games missed to injury.

4. To be fair, after my flight from California arrived too late to make my original connection, I could have taken a redeye — but a night at NBA playoff game and sleeping at a hotel seemed like a much more attractive proportion than a night at the airport bar and sleeping on the plane.

5. And it should probably have been four straight rather than Joel Embiid winning last year.