Ingram: "Durant Phantom" Struggling in the Crack between Talent and Reality

When Brandon Ingram was selected by the Lakers as the second pick in the 2016 draft, the label of "Durant Jr." was engraved in his basketball genes like a tattoo. This 2.06-meter-high and 2.21-meter-span, with a slender figure and silky projection that is exactly the same as Kevin Durant, Magic Johnson, then the Lakers president, even publicly declared: "We found the next super scorer to dominate the league. "Eight years have passed, and when Durant still maintained a top-level output of 27 points per game with the Suns, 28-year-old Ingram fell into the deepest fog of his career in the Pelicans' locker room.

Engram's similarity to Durant stays at the superficial visual mirror. Durant's seemingly thin skeleton contains extraordinary confrontational ability. The rookie's physical test of 84 kg bench presses is far beyond the average level of players in the same position. When Ingram entered the league, he weighed only 86 kilograms. Even after years of gaining muscle, the defect of unstable center of gravity during the confrontation was always with him. This physical difference directly leads to the two's division in the ending method - Durant can create shooting space with exaggerated front-body change, but Ingram has to rely on a large number of step-and-step jump shots to avoid defense. The deviation in the evolutionary path of

is more fatal. Durant was allowed to average 17 shots per game during the Supersonics. Even though he had a shooting percentage of only 43%, the team still gave him unlimited firing rights to polish his singles skills. In contrast, Ingram's growth trajectory: egalitarianism during the Lakers period and tactical downgrades after Zion's comeback during the Pelicans period have kept his ball-holding offense in a fragmented state. When Durant was 24 years old, he had three scoring champions, but Ingram, who was the same age, was still learning how to maintain the dribbling rhythm under high-intensity defense.

The functional demand of modern basketball for forward players is undergoing drastic changes. In the Pelicans' binary system of "Ball-Holding Core + Space Scorer", Ingram was forced to switch back and forth between the organization's forward and the off-ball ending point. When Zion played healthy in the 2022-23 season, his proportion of receiving jump shots increased sharply to 42%, which directly caused his real shooting rate to drop to a career-lowest 56.3%. This chaos in positioning was infinitely amplified in the playoffs: in the series facing the Thunder, when the opponent used Dort to lead the defense in the whole game, Ingram's turnover rate soared to 19.7%, revealing his fatal shortcomings as a playmaker. The limitations of the defensive end further compressed his tactical value. The 2.21-meter-21-meter-long arm span should be a talent certificate for the top defender, but the lack of horizontal movement speed makes it impossible for him to effectively switch small men and withstand the back of the heavy striker. Advanced data shows that when Ingram is the main defender, his opponent's shooting percentage will increase by 3.2 percentage points compared to usual, and this negative defensive influence can be regarded as a disaster among the championship-level forward players.

At the intersection of the 2024 offseason, Ingram's team is seeking a maximum salary renewal, while the Pelicans management shows rare hesitation. Behind this tug-of-war, the league's revaluation of the value of "half-boy ball holder" - when Jaylen Brown used violent breakthrough to tear the defense line and Tatum improved efficiency with a magic ball-based offense, Ingram's iconic mid-range single-handed challenge was becoming an efficiency depression. His career 32.8% three-point shooting percentage is particularly dazzling in an era where space first.

But the flame of hope has not yet been extinguished. During the 2023 World Cup, when Coach Cole transformed him into an organizational forward, Ingram's performance of averaging 5.4 assists and only 1.2 turnovers per game showed the possibility of tactical role transformation. If he can develop a stable three-pointer at the age of 28 (38.1% of C&S three-point shooting percentage last season) and improve his defensive focus, this genius who has been joked about by fate for seven years may also find a way to rebirth in the positioning of the functional front line.

History is always particularly cruel to the "genius" who fall behind in the middle, but the basketball world will always leave a narrow door for those who are willing to tear off the label. When the video of Ingram's hard training in the offseason was leaked, people saw not a fallen Durant imitator, but a fighter who was bleeding from his head on the iron wall of reality but still refused to fall. This transformation proposition from "Durant's successor" to "a better self" may be the cruelest and most realistic coming-of-age ceremony in Ingram's basketball career.