At the risk of sounding like a pessimist, it's entirely possible that Kevin Durant, who is gearing up for his 18th NBA season, will never be given his flowers as one of the most skilled players the game has ever seen. Mileage may vary but Durant is widely seen as a top-20 or even top-15 player of all time, yet the fact that he had to jump around a bit to secure his two NBA championships is held more against him than any other star of the player-empowerment era.

Durant is back in the forefront of the NBA mind after he was dealt to the Houston Rockets a few hours before Sunday night's Game 7. And so are the Durant takes.

Emmanuel Acho shared one of his on Monday's episode of Speak, employing a formula he created to quantify a player's legacy. And if you're thinking that it's too early in the morning to do math, rest assured that the formula is very straightforward: championships won divided by teams played for.

As the chart shows, Durant scores 0.4 legacy points. This puts him 0.9 points behind LeBron James and 3.6 points behind Stephen Curry. It feels like we already knew that to be the case but seeing it laid out empirically shows ... something. Or maybe it doesn't, as Durant suggested.

It's interesting that KD seems to be taking umbrage with the mathematician and not the math.

Acho himself played two seasons in the NFL, both with the Philadelphia Eagles. Neither of those teams won the Super Bowl. When you divide something by zero the value is undefined.

Obviously, none of this really matters. Athlete's legacies are simply not as widely discussed in the real world as they are on sports debate television. At the end of the day, Durant will have at least two titles to his ledger in addition to all his counting stats and the visual evidence that, unscientifically, he rules at basketball.

Ring culture became incredibly important yet the math there reveals some hard truths. Only one team per year can win it all. And apparently in some years—like during the Golden State Warriors' dynastic run, Durant was ineligible to get credit for a championship because his team was too good. Yet Stephen Curry gets full points for those rings because he didn't play for other teams.

Math is confusing. Even with the simplest formulas.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Kevin Durant, Emmanuel Acho Have Beef Over a Math Formula.

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