It’s looks like I have a basketball team to blog about this NBA season in Oklahoma City. The team tank practitioners need to follow Golden State or the NY Knicks or the Atlanta Hawks if that’s what they want to follow this season.
You can’t tank in Oklahoma City this far into a season standing with a 16-15 record thirty-one games into a season. This isn’t New York or Los Angeles. This is a different deal. You don’t tank in Mystery, Alaska. Period.
You can trade Danilo Gallinari for a player still on an existing rookie scale contract. You can start making sure fireball spark plug Lou Dort starts getting 15 minutes a game. You could even send millennial Daily Thunder fave rookie Darius Bazely to the G league to become an NBA ready player. But Sam Presti can’t tank at this point. He just can’t.
After getting outworked at home the night before the Thunder went to work in Charlotte on the second night of a back to back and quite frankly won a game which bordered on ugly at times. But in the end — the Thunder did all the little things absent on Thursday night in the bad loss to Memphis.
In case you haven’t noticed this Thunder team has a nice little three-headed monster line which combines Chris Paul, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Dennis Schroder. In hockey parlance this is Billy Donovan’s power play. When Donovan puts these three together for meaningful minutes good things are happening for the Thunder with some consistency of late.
In hockey parlance again—with these three together the ice is being tilted in favor of the Thunder when Donovan keeps the three guards on the floor and keeps Darius Bazely sitting close to him and Maurice Cheeks on the bench.
It’s pretty to watch. The ball moves. Stupid low percentage shots are not aplenty as they were in the two previous seasons of Thunder play. Dumbass possessions aren’t happening. It appears as if the team’s point guard (Chris Paul) is listening to the coach. I won’t go any further.
Chris Paul was my MVP’er in this game. But in reality it could have been Shai just as well.
It doesn’t matter because when you’re winning as a team basketball becomes a magical almost spiritual thing to observe. It really does. That wasn’t some bullshit hyperbole on my part.
Because in the end winning is fun, but it’s even more fun when the team you’re rooting for is doing it the right way.
On to Toronto for a late Sunday afternoon game against the defending world champion Raptors. This should be a very entertaining game.
LET’S GO THUNDER!