👋 GOOD MORNING

Happy Thursday! Hopefully you’re having a good week — Kevin Durant’s is sure going well, but I’ve got more on that below. Before we get to it, I wanted to issue a correction from yesterday’s newsletter, as I incorrectly listed the final score of the Arizona/Kansas State men’s basketball game as 73-30. It should have said 73-70, though to be fair, Damon and Kevin’s reactions on the PHNX postgame show sure made it feel like it was a 43-point loss 😅.

In all seriousness, apologies for the error, and I will do better!

On to the show!

Durant’s Greatness On Full Display After Surpassing Another Career Milestone

The Suns may be having a mediocre season, but their stars have been on full display.

Just a week after Devin Booker became the Suns’ all-time leading scorer, Kevin Durant made some history of his own and joined some rare air in the process: The 36-year-old became just the eighth player in NBA history to record 30,000 career points in the Suns’ 119-112 loss to Memphis on Tuesday night. Simply put, KD is a legend. The 17-year veteran is in his third season in The Valley, and showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Quick caveat — I know the Suns lost yet again last night (119-111 to the Houston Rockets), but let’s not focus on that bad, and instead call attention to the fact that Durant led the team with 37 points. He just doesn’t stop!

Who’s Who of Basketball: The 15-time All-Star joined Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki and Wilt Chamberlain — an incredible accomplishment. He has finished with over 1,000 points in all but one of his seasons (he has already eclipsed that mark this year), and eclipsed 2,000 in five of those years.

• Rookie of the Year in 2007-08
• 11-time All-NBA Team
• Four-time scoring champion
• Two-time NBA champion, two-time Finals MVO, two-time All-Star Game MVP
• Won 2013-14 MVP and has finished as runner-up three times.

Espo’s Take: “Kevin Durant is unlike any other basketball player I’ve ever watched. He makes everything look easy, and age and injury have not impacted or touched his ability to score. It’s easy to take what he does for granted because it looks like it takes little effort, when the degree of difficulty is next to impossible.”

Sound off: Is Kevin Durant one of the 10-best NBA players of all time? Let us know in our poll at the bottom of this page!

Musings From Around (and Sometimes Beyond) The Valley

Raided: The ASU men’s basketball team lost an absolute heartbreaker last night, falling 111-106 in double overtime to Texas Tech in Lubbock. Adam Miller led the Sun Devils with 22 points, but the loss is extremely damaging for ASU’s March Madness hopes, and it’s looking more and more likely that they’ll need to run the table in the Big 12 Tourney in order to get in.

Reign of Terror: The Tucson Roadrunners got back into the win column with a victory over Bakersfield on Tuesday, but fell 4-1 to the Ontario Reign last night. Tucson is 2-3-0-0 in the month of February, and has some work to do in order to make up some ground in the highly competitive Pacific Division.

Double Trouble: Both the Arizona and ASU women’s basketball teams dropped their matchups last night; the former fell 83-64 to No. 20 Oklahoma State, while the latter lost 85-76 at UCF. The Sun Devils are just 2-11 in the Big 12 this season, though the Wildcats have had a bit more success at 6-7 in the conference.

🧢 Tip of the Hat

Nice to see Corbin Burnes out there for the first time as a D-Back!