JJ Redick And Kevin Durant Laughed At The Idea College Teams Play Better Defense Than The NBA

Basketball is pretty good. In spite of this, every year around the NCAA Tournament, people who primarily like college basketball and people who primarily like the NBA yell at each other about which version of the same game is better, which never changes anyone’s minds and then, at the end of it all, people usually just end up watching whatever basketball is on TV.

This year, JJ Redick saw a take that bugged him about how college players play defense harder than NBA players, and if they just tried harder on that end, games would end up in the 70s and 80s. Redick, on a crossover podcast between The Old Man & The Three and The ETCs with Kevin Durant, said the tweet came from a “knucklehead” before diving into why it was wrong.

“First of all, it’s just math, first of all, the shot clock’s longer, so there’s gonna be more possessions in an NBA game and there’s eight more minutes of basketball, so f*ckhead, that’s not possible,” Redick said. “Secondly, what he doesn’t understand is, you watch college basketball, man, I’m like, ‘these guys have not evolved their philosophy since the 1980s or 1990s,’ it’s ridiculous. Same sets, same sets that I used to run, that I used to watch growing up, that Kansas used to run. I’m like, bro, do you know why it’s so hard to play defense in the NBA? It’s not cause we can’t, and it’s not cause we don’t try, it’s cause there’s f*cking space, and the players are so good.”

Durant, who knows a thing or two about scoring in a basketball game, agreed with Redick, asking, “do you think somebody’s just gonna guard up and hold a team to 70 points that has a f*ckin’ 30-point scorer on it?” You can watch the whole podcast here.