21st century peaks Ep 9 | Mega Hybrid scorers
Thinking Basketball
Thinking Basketball
4.8 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
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Summary
Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant were both voluminous score on and off-ball. We discuss Durant's playoff scoring, the impact of his gravity, his floor-raising in Oklahoma City and his more mobile Thunder defense. Then, we upend Kobe Bryant's “inefficiency” narrative, contextualize his problem-solving and huge scoring numbers without dominating the ball. Support atwww.patreon.com/thinkingbasketball
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thinking Basketball Podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome back to episode nine of our series on the greatest |
| 0:13.8 | peaks of the 21st century. It's the best basketball player seasons since the year 2000, 2001. |
| 0:22.3 | Because, you know, in the NBA, they start the season in one year and they finish it in |
| 0:25.3 | the other year. |
| 0:26.5 | And the year before that started in the 20th century, 1999 to 2000. |
| 0:30.0 | So we got 25 years and 25 peaks. |
| 0:32.9 | This is episode nine. |
| 0:34.4 | I won't do the recap that I usually do. |
| 0:37.4 | We'll do it next time. We'll do it next time. |
| 0:38.9 | Because today, here's why. Because today we're, we're yet again, the players just keep getting |
| 0:44.6 | better and better, Cody. And we are sliding up the ladder today on our list running out of players. |
| 0:51.4 | Today we're in the top 10. Can you believe? How do you feel? We're in the top 10 can you believe how do you feel we're |
| 0:54.5 | in the top 10 well for i'm still on the whole like the fact that we count the year by the second |
| 1:00.3 | half of the year in the NBA because i was i was thinking about i think i was looking at books recently |
| 1:04.5 | and i was like oh what would be my 25 books of the 21st century in my head i had to start with |
| 1:10.4 | 2001 and i'm like oh for for regular things you probably don't have to books of the 21st century. In my head, I had to start with 2001. |
| 1:11.6 | And I'm like, oh, for regular things, you probably don't have to do that. But I think there's actually a big debate as to whether or 2000 or 2001 is the beginning of the century. So unequivocally, the correct answer to start in 01 for basketball. But for other things, I'm not so sure. Yeah. So, um, with that said, |
| 1:29.1 | now that we're in the top 10, thanks for giving me a great segue there into the basketball players. |
| 1:33.8 | Now that, now that we're in the top 10, this next group of players, uh, we're, there's, |
| 1:42.2 | there's too many to get through in one episode. There's a number of players I kind of want to |
| 1:46.5 | discuss in the next chunk of players before we really get to the finish line here. And these guys |
| 1:53.9 | do it in very different ways. So today I wanted to talk about what I call the hybrid score, the hybrid offensive player, meaning we're |
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