The K.D. Ratio

When K.D. Johnson was on last season, he was one of the best players for Auburn basketball. But can the "maniac" 2 guard be a more consistent player next season?

SG K.D. Johnson (Jacob Taylor/Auburn Athletics)

In the world of online first-person shooter video games, the almighty statistic for players is the K/D ratio — the number of kills divided by the number of player deaths.

The average K/D ratio for a player in the extremely popular Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale game is 0.92. Most players hang out either just below or just above 1.00 K/D on average, and wild fluctuations can happen from game to game. You can get hot with several eliminations in a single game, only to quickly go on a cold streak of low-scoring matches.

It’s pretty fitting, then, for Call of Duty to be one of Auburn shooting guard K.D. Johnson’s favorite video games.¹

K.D. Johnson is the basketball version of the K/D Ratio. He can be a killer for opponents — or he can be at the center of a death of his team’s chances to win. The K.D. stands for Kadarius, but it could easily stand for Kill/Death.²

Truth be told, Johnson was more on the positive side of that ratio last season for Auburn, which won the SEC regular-season championship outright and climbed all the way to No. 1 in the country for the first time ever. The Tigers won 82.3% of their games, went on a 19-game winning streak at one point and never lost consecutive contests. Johnson was a key figure to that success.

“You never know exactly what you're going to get,” Bruce Pearl said in March. “But more often than not, he's delivered for us.”