The Houston Rockets beat the Boston Celtics 109-93 on Monday night and moved to 7-1, the best record in the Western Conference. Kevin Durant scored 12 points on six shot attempts. He made five of them.
Six attempts is a season low. It was the third time in Houston’s first eight games that the fifth-leading scorer in NBA history took fewer than 10 shots. Four other Rockets starters outscored him.
Houston Chronicle beat writer Varun Shankar asked about it afterward. That did not go well.
The Exchange
“Why does that matter to you?” Durant said. “We won the game. Why are you singling me out?”
He pointed to Jabari Smith Jr., who scored 30 two nights earlier against Oklahoma City and 14 against Boston. “Are you going to talk about his variety?”
Shankar: “Jabari isn’t the fifth-leading scorer in NBA history.”
Durant: “What does that have to do with anything? Are you just watching me all game? Do you have a solo cam on me? We won the basketball game.”
When Shankar said he did not mean it as criticism, Durant told him, “Yes, you do.”
Then, having spent a minute insisting the question was unfair, he answered it well. “My presence on the court, regardless, is just opening up for everybody,” Durant said. “So they don’t have to give me the ball. They’re going to double team, they’re going to shade guys to me, even when I don’t have the ball. So my presence alone is impactful to the game of basketball. I don’t have to shoot, I don’t have to dribble.”
The Question Was Fair, and Durant Knows It
Durant is averaging 20.8 points on 12.3 field goal attempts with a 23.6 percent usage rate. That attempt figure is more than five fewer per game than last season and roughly six below his career average. The 20.8 would be his lowest scoring average since his rookie year in 2007-08.
He is 38, in his second season in Houston after the record seven-team trade that moved him from Phoenix in July 2025, and he is on a two-year, $90 million extension paying him $43.9 million this season. He signed that deal for about $30 million below the maximum he was eligible for.
Alperen Sengun leads the Rockets in both shot attempts and usage, and he put up 26 points and 10 assists against Boston. Houston has the second-best offensive rating in the league at 121.2. The team is fine. That is exactly why the question is interesting rather than hostile: an all-time scorer settling into a supporting role on a contender at 38 is a story, and asking about it is the job.
Udoka Gave the Honest Answer
Ime Udoka did not pretend nothing was happening. “I got to do a better job putting him in spots to avoid being double-teamed,” the Rockets coach said. “I know he gets frustrated at times, but we got to stay the course.” On opponents denying Durant the ball past half court, he added that “there are some counters.”
That is a head coach confirming his star is frustrated, within an hour of the star insisting there was nothing to ask about.
Durant has earned the right to be prickly with a notebook. He has also spent his entire career as the reason defenses exist, and the adjustment to being a gravity well rather than a volume scorer is the sort of thing that makes a man testy in November. Houston is winning. He is shooting less than at any point since he was a teenager. Both things are true, and only one of them is a problem he can talk his way out of.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
