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Kevin Durant's

playground

is the Olympics, which further expand the impact of a unique player, a talent for serious gestures, bad blood, infinite arms and indecipherable movements. A few hours before the final against France, in which he again set the tone, Tokyo woke up with the news of the multi-million dollar extension of his contract with the Nets. Stratospheric salary of a stratospheric guy.

He is not a leader of gestures and fuss. It never was. Durant leads by his stealthy example, with those relentless triples, with his indefensible strides. France was unbalanced in a brutal first part. He had done it before in the quarterfinals against Spain and in the semifinals against Australia. And that had started in Saitama with a mute (just 20 points in total in the first two games). Yesterday he was in his early thirties, matching his score in the last two finals (30 in London and 30 in Rio).

Although before, during the tournament, he had already surpassed another bar.

The one marked by

Carmelo Anthony

(336 points) as the highest all-time scorer for the USA in the Games.

And he put on the table a debate that seems settled: he is the best player to ever wear the USA Team jersey, which added his 16th gold in basketball.

Only Melo himself knew what it was like to win three Olympic crowns.

The 2019 injury

To that trident we must add the 2010 World Cup, when at the age of 22 he led the US in Turkey, his first international notch. Global trophies to add to your two rings, to your hundreds of accolades. Not all are tangible successes. Durant also won when his Achilles tendon said enough in that terrible injury during the fifth game of the 2019 Finals that was going to take him 18 months out of the game, for which he had to "learn to walk again."

He returned at the beginning of the already finished season, enrolled in the penultimate adventure, that of some Nets who were soon to add

James Harden

for a great Big Three with

Kyrie Irving

. But, in the crunch of the playoffs, Durant was alone, the other stars injured. And he was about to liquidate the one who would later be champion. By millimeters his gigantic shoe - "my damn and huge foot ..." (he plays with one more number for comfort) - stepped on the triple line and instead of giving the victory in the second round to the Brooklyn team the seventh game went to overtime, where

Antetokounmpo's

Bucks beat

. That day he was on the court for 53 minutes and scored 48 points.

Durant is gold and he is paid as if he were. With his renewal by the Nets, he will become the first player in history to accumulate the 500 million dollars guaranteed, surpassing the 470 of

Stephen Curry

.

Against France, his first part was to remember. "It is difficult not to see to what extent he is good. He is a special player and he has shown it above all in the last matches," reasoned a

Damian Lillard

who was known to have played with an abdominal injury all the Games and that he wanted to put I show how complicated it is sometimes to make a team with stars and to perform internationally. His partner in Brooklyn,

Luwawu-Cabarrot

, was his

bulldog

in the second half: "Durant made mistakes in the end, like everyone else. He was tired, like everyone else. We could have done a better job in the first half." .

"We fight among ourselves all year in the NBA, but we have become brothers for life before the rest of the world," settled the great protagonist, to the same that

Gregg Popovich

swears he would have "begged" if he had not agreed to go to Tokyo.

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