We owe a gigantic thank you to Kevin Durant and LeBron James for this regular season. Amid a tumultuous season riddled by injury, they gave us one of the great MVP battles of recent memory. After seesawing back and forth over the past several weeks, Durant managed to edge out James in both real plus-minus and player efficiency rating. It's clear that there's Durant and James, and then there's everybody else.
We can't take these two titans for granted. Not just because we have a pair of all-time greats in their primes at the same position playing on title contenders, but because of something else: They're pushing their bodies to the absolute limit.
Durant played more minutes than any other player in the NBA this season and missed only one game. While other stars rested before the finish line, Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks didn't give Durant a break; he played 42 minutes in the season finale. And while Dwyane Wade missed 28 games to rest and treat his troublesome legs, James received only two games at the end of the regular season to catch a breather.
But the astonishing thing is how much work these two stars have put in the past four seasons with almost no rest. With four Finals trips between them, they've played far more minutes than any other player in the league.
Check out the staggering chart below.
James and Durant are just on another level. Durant has played 2,057 more minutes than the third-highest player on the list, Chris Bosh, and James has put in 165 more minutes on top of that. In fact, James has played almost 5,000 more minutes than Tim Duncan, who ranks 50th in minutes at 9,437.
And that's not even counting the Olympics or preseason competition. That wears on the body as well. According to ESPN Stats & Information, James has played an extra 13 games (330 minutes) in Olympic competition since he came to Miami. By playing in both the 2010 FIBA World Championship and 2012 Olympics, Durant has registered 26 games (694 minutes) of international competition in addition to his NBA duties. So the workload gap between these two titans and the rest of the NBA is actually far wider than shown above.
This much is clear: Over the past three and a half years, James and Durant have essentially crammed in an extra NBA season compared to the rest of the league.
The burnout factor is real, especially when you consider how much more work James and Durant had to absorb this season because of injuries suffered by their star teammates. For the first time since joining the Heat, James actually played the majority of his minutes without Wade on the court. Durant has carried a similar burden with Russell Westbrook undergoing three knee surgeries in an eight-month span. Durant played an NBA-high 3,122 minutes this season -- 99 more minutes than the next-highest workload this season.
You don't get a badge on the sleeve or a plaque on the wall for playing more than 3,000 minutes in a regular season. And recent history shows that all that hard work doesn't yield a championship either. According to 2012 research from ESPN's Henry Abbott, in the previous seven years none of the 3,000-minute club members won a title -- not since the 2004 Detroit Pistons upset the Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals with Ben Wallace clocking in at 3,050 minutes. That's not great news for Durant.
The evidence is damning. More than 100 players since Wallace have burned 3,000 minutes in the regular season -- including some of the biggest names in the sport such as James, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant -- and none have endured long enough in the playoffs to win a title during that time. Only those who played fewer than 3,000 minutes have grasped the Larry O'Brien Trophy recently. Durant hopes the trend is more fluke than for real.
Of course, it's foolish to think that James is in the clear because he only nudged up to the line -- with 2,902 minutes this season -- without crossing it. It's not like a starting pitcher is magically less prone to injury by throwing 99 pitches in an outing compared to 100 pitches. But a 2,902-minute workload marks the most he's played since 2010-11, when he infamously flamed out against Dallas in the Finals.
The counterargument is that all of the all-time greats have done this at one time or another. Michael Jordan didn't miss a game in his early 30s when he three-peated. In his first three-peat, he missed only one game. And he averaged far more minutes than Durant and James. Never mind that he didn't play in each of the following seasons after the three-peat treks. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson both put in a string of marathon seasons, but Bird and Johnson hardly put in the same defensive work as James and Durant do in today's NBA.
Over the last few seasons, Durant and James have tested the limits of their bodies. By all accounts, they're physical freaks. But as Catapult Sports and other injury-prevention analytics inform us about the dangers of overuse and power of rest, we have to wonder if our two biggest stars are also the two most vulnerable to burn out.
Durant and James have given us everything. How much more do their bodies have left to give?