Durant answers his critics in the best way possible - with Olympic gold

Kevin Durant has always craved acclaim, inhabited by this sense that he has never got his due.

This is a two-time NBA champion, a league MVP, an 11-time All Star and when all is said and done, someone who will be regarded as one of the top 15 basketball players of all time, at the very least.

He has achieved virtually everything you can in the sport and after a virtuoso display against France in the Olympic final in Saitama, Durant is now a triple Olympic champion, joining Carmelo Anthony as the only two male basketball players to have achieved the feat.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the USA would not have won gold - live Eurosport and discovery+ - without him. He scored 29 points in an 87-82 victory that was a one-score game with ten seconds remaining. It was fitting that he drained the free throws that iced the match.

His 29 points are the fewest he has scored in an Olympic final, with 30 in each of his previous two. He has been the key man every time, but the USA have never been as reliant on him as they were here.

And yet, Durant will always have his critics. Back in 2016, he left the Oklahoma City Thunder to join a Golden State Warriors team that had just enjoyed the best regular season in history. Despite the two titles that followed, there was a view that he had taken the easy route.

Most sports stars ignore the digs on social media, or the barbs from pundits, but Durant is not one of them.

So desperate was he to defend himself, that he created fake social media accounts, so-called burners, to argue with fans under a cloak of anonymity.

Since that ruse was unearthed, he has continued to hit back at critics under his own name, although in 2020 he admitted that he still uses the burners.

Durant just signed a $198 million extension to stay with the Brooklyn Nets and is fifth all time in career earnings in NBA history. He has everything.

And yet he still feels the need to respond to slights from a man on the street who has achieved nothing more than opening a Twitter account.

The most memorable line of ‘The Last Dance', the recent Netflix documentary on Michael Jordan, is when the Chicago Bulls great says: ‘And I took that personally'.

Making things personal was what drove Jordan to become the greatest ever. Durant has a similar ability to use the most innocuous comments for motivation.

The entire USA team came into the final under some pressure. They had lost to France in their opening group game, a first Olympic defeat in 17 years when Durant fouled out after scoring just ten points. The French had also knocked them out of the last World Cup.

When Rudy Gobert backed Durant up and dunked over him for the first points of the game, you wondered whether an unlikely hat-trick of French wins might be possible.

Instead, Durant took it personally. Despite a slow start from three-point range, the Americans missed their first eight shots from deep, Durant took over and had 21 points by half-time.

The USA's swarming defence ensured that once an early lead had been erased, France were always playing catch-up from midway through the first quarter.

Twice it looked like it would become a blowout, but the French fought back from double digit deficits. The five-point margin of victory is the smallest in any Olympic basketball final won by the USA.

It never quite felt like France would have enough to snatch victory, but their coach Vincent Collet was not wrong when he claimed that it was a real contest. The US were pushed to the limit.

Had the otherwise excellent Gobert been a little more accurate from the free-throw line, or if the French had committed slightly fewer than their 18 turnovers, the upset was possible.

This France team is talented but they were not at their best here and that was clearly the regret for captain Nicolas Batum.

France truly believed they had a shot at beating the USA and taking gold. If not for Kevin Durant, they might well have done so.

Perhaps it is time that he got his due.

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