Tennessee finished a film session on Sunday night, and Dalton Knecht was the last player in the locker room because he was heading to work out with graduate assistant Riley Collins. Before Knecht and Collins walked out the door, coach Rick Barnes screamed out, “Wait! I’ve got to show you something.”
Barnes took out his iPad and had an edit ready of Kevin Durant’s best three games at Texas — 37 points at Oklahoma State, 32 at Kansas and 37 in the 2007 Big 12 championship against the Jayhawks. Barnes narrated each play.
Look at how fast KD gets the ball up to the rim. Look at how long he is but how low he plays. Look at how he sees the game before it happens. Look at how he drives into gaps and won’t let his defender get his hand on the ball.
Knecht sat in silence, drinking in every word. He is still in awe that the guy who coached his favorite player is now his coach, and he’s reached a level where Barnes has the same confidence in him that he had in Durant.
The whole world quickly saw that Durant — the second-ranked player in his high school class — was a generational talent. Knecht has been the All-American no one saw coming. He was a late bloomer — 5-foot-4 as a high school freshman with no Division I offers his senior year — and he arrived at Tennessee after four years in college basketball anonymity, playing at Northeastern Junior College and then Northern Colorado.
“I’m not in any way shape or form comparing him to KD, but he can learn from what he does,” Barnes tells The Athletic. “And the one thing he does have in common with KD is he can’t get enough of the gym.”
Read the rest of my January feature here.
GO FURTHER
How Dalton Knecht went from unknown to Tennessee basketball’s missing ingredient