This will be the No. 1 storyline this year in the Oklahoma sports landscape. Westbrook and Paul George are gone. The college market could never put a top tier shooting guard along them and in Oklahoma it won’t be the NBA team driving the sports news cycle in as much at some point you have to start playing games and can’t just trade away players for draft picks.
The Jalen Hurts story is a great one. He was 26-2 as a starter at Alabama and was part of two national championships and then got beat out by Tua for the QB job. He didn’t transfer. He hung in there and got a chance in the Georgia game. He led his team to victory with a miraculous comeback and now as a graduate transfer at OU he has an opportunity to close his college career on his terms with Lincoln Riley.
It doesn’t get much better than this and sports fans in Oklahoma will be able to forget what just happened with the Thunder this free agency season.
It’s the sixth straight day of heat indexes above 105 degrees out here at the Deer Creek weather station. Massive humidity readings are driving this . It was 93% humidity at 7:00am this morning.
I’m not thinking all that much about the OKC Thunder. They’re anecdotal to a certain extent at this point. I would guess both OU football and Cleveland Brown football and maybe even perhaps Houston Rockets basketball will be more watched this season than the Thunder by knowledgeable sports fans in Oklahoma. And, of course, you’ll have the diehard O State Aggie fans who for some reason will think this is the year of their Haley’s Comet season.
Jalen Hurts, Baker Mayfield, James Harden and Russell Westbrook will be the storylines. Shei Gilgous-Alexander will answer Berry Tramel’s questions and no one will care.
I’ve always secretly wondered if Clay Bennett was giving Tramel the thumbs up to help drive Russell Westbrook out of Oklahoma City with all the Tramel press conference antics.
I could honestly care less either way because the team wasn’t working and wasn’t going anywhere and that’s precisely why Paul George asked to be traded.
Yesterday.. I was wearing my Auburn War Eagle ball cap inside a 7-11 and this cute girl smiled and said, “Roll Tide.”
I said, “OU has your quarterback.”
She said, ” We have the one who beat him out.”
I then said, “And Clemson still has the quarterback who beat his ass in the national championship game.”
She smiled and walked away.
See what I mean?
The Thunder have become anecdotal and life is still very good.
For some reason I woke up this morning and this is the music I’m still caring around inside my head all day.
It’s difficult at times being the only honest Thunder blogger amid the sea of Clay Bennett puppets such as Little Nick Gallo and Low Energy…so you must have some down time and reflect or you’ll lose all your brain cells.. Re-energize yourself as if you just attended a Donald Trump rally in West Virginia or Lawton.
This is a secret tip for all you aspiring Thunder bloggers. This is my best trick. Twenty or so minutes of this and I’m good regardless of whatever bullshit I’ve either read or heard in the little college market in which Baker Mayfield will be the most followed athlete this season with the departures of Westbrook and Paul George.
Try it…you might like it. It’s very refreshing. Almost cleansing.
See how many times you can spot Alex Abrines in the video.
Clay Bennett and his team won’t rank high. Tanking in a big way and for very long will not play in a place like Oklahoma.
The Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis tank which put Clay Bennett in a position to tank for the rights to Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden primarily took place while the franchise was still in Seattle in wait of being shipped to Oklahoma by the Thunder ownership group.
Only one season of tanking took place in Oklahoma and in that initial season in Oklahoma the Thunder went 23-59, but it was a fun mini-tank. Scott Brooks told the kids to run back faster and play harder. He screamed at them to play defense. Can anyone in their right mind a decade later imagine the expressions on the three faces of Durant, Westbrook and Harden now if a coach talked to them like Scott Brooks did back in the beginning?
They’d walk. Their agents would demand a trade. The hard core truth is Oklahoma isn’t much a place for an NBA star once they reach their third contract in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. The tenets of slavery per se are gone and a star is free to escape a place like Oklahoma which went almost seventy per cent for Donald Trump.
If I were a black star in the NBA would I play in Oklahoma if I didn’t have to?
Not a chance.
Truth hurts.
Can you imagine former Clay Bennett employee Berry Tramel or Little Nick Gallo or Low Energy Royce Young ever writing what I just wrote?
Not a chance.
But anyway, where will the Thunder rank if they go too far and too long into a tanking mode?
I’d say it would go something like this: 1 OU football, 2 O State football, 3 maybe the hoops program between OU and O State which emerges as the alpha dog this year after both have good recruiting classes in place, 4 the Cleveland Browns, and then maybe the Thunder if they tank beyond this one season.
Tanking will not play in Oklahoma. John Blake was not a tanking move, but rather just a horrific decision on a coaching hire. Travis Ford was not a tanking strategy either, but again it was just another bad coaching hire after Bill Self said ‘no thanks’.
OU didn’t stockpile draft picks during the John Blake Era in Norman. Rather it brought empty seats, apathy, and malaise.
This is just me thinking out loud, but if I were the Thunder ownership group I wouldn’t tank hard and I wouldn’t tank long.
Berry Tramel was on the Sports Animal this morning and he was hilarious. Of course much of the talk centered around his ‘Next Question’ routines with Russell Westbrook.
To Tramel’s credit he readily admitted no one really on the national NBA circuit knew of him all that much before because in essence he’s made his career covering college sports in Oklahoma. Tramel admits the opposite is now true because of his post game side shows with Russell Westbrook not answering questions while Little Nick Gallo guarded the face of the Thunder franchise.
So did Tramel just troll Westbrook to gain some attention and maybe get some hits for his newspaper?
I would say probably to a certain extent. I mean none of the questions Tramel ever asked really had anything attached of any real significance if you follow basketball at all. Not one question did I hear which in reality would be one I would have asked.
But still it was great comedic theatre in the age of the internet where let’s be frank anyone will do anything to get or attract hits.
Someone on the morning show asked Tramel if he planned on attending Westbrook’s first presser in Houston.
My response would be, ” Go for it.” Give your readers some entertainment because they’re not going to get all that much in the next eighty-two games where things stand now.
Take Little Nick Gallo along as the puppet prop he genuinely is and go full bore with it and see what happens with the numbers and the clicks.
With the Oklahoma City Thunder pointing towards a tank the OU Sooners in quest of a third straight Final Four appearance becomes the primary storyline in Oklahoma heading into August.
Can Jalen Hurts be the third straight OU quarterback to win a Heisman?
Will the OU defense be able to be somewhat respectable?
And how will the kicking game without Austin Seibert be this season?
Some real questions for Lincoln Riley now in his third season at OU.
The Thunder will go back to being the second storyline in Oklahoma sports wise and possibly even the third depending how what O State redshirt freshman quarterback Spencer Sanders shows this season.
Should be an extremely fun college football season in Oklahoma.
Let’s do this even though I have a Lincoln Riley caption…let’s take a look at Spencer Sander’s senior high school season in Denton, Texas when he won the Texas high school player of the year.
If you’re an O State fan I would think you might be salivating thinking of what Spencer Sanders does this football season.
Woke up today on Monday and I didn’t much think of Russell Westbrook or Clay Bennett’s tanking Oklahoma City Thunder. I have Klay Thompson and the Warriors in my fall back position so in reality why do I need to be sweating the Thunder tank and rebuild.
I’m not.
I won’t.
He didn’t even play defense.
It’s baseball season and the LA Dodgers are the best team in major league baseball and quite frankly I’ve moved on as long as Reggie Jackson somehow doesn’t end up back in Oklahoma City.
It’s the Libra in me. I don’t stay down for long. Quite frankly…I think I’m the only one in my family who isn’t completely fucking crazy.
I’m not exactly sure when and where Chris Paul and Danilo Gallanari will be traded, but they will and when they are the tank in Oklahoma City is official.
Michael Cage on the Fox telecasts along with Little Nick Gallo will tell us the Thunder are not tanking. But the Thunder at some point will be tanking because the Thunder own their own first round pick and if they hit bingo with a top four lottery pick the rebuild becomes much more certain in OKC for Sam Presti.
I assume Michael Cage is still on the telecast and the first Fox Telecast of the season will rank right there with Trump’s address to the Boy Scouts of America in West Virginia for pure unfiltered bullshit.
Anyway, providing some tanking music here and there might be fun.
It is what it is. You can’t dwell on the fact they had three MVP’s and didn’t win one championship. You move on. You deal with it. It was a tough week. The Jerami Grant trade was the toughest because that’s when you knew where this was going. Diana Krall always relaxes me. I’m going to drink some wine and fall asleep and hope Presti doesn’t make a trade which brings Reggie Jackson back to Oklahoma City. That would be Ground Zero… rock bottom.
Have a nice Sunday. Stiff upper lip.
Try to enjoy other things which you enjoy doing. Lots of concerts this Thunder basketball season…lots of concerts.
This made me cry, but they were tears of happiness. It was refreshing to see this week of turmoil in Oklahoma City reflected on in this manner by one Russell Westbrook.
As I heard it…it wasn’t basketball I was thinking about. What I was thinking about was Russell the person, the son, the brother, the husband, and the father. I never once really even thought that much about the basketball of the past eleven seasons in Oklahoma City.
This is the part of Russell Westbrook it’s impossible not to love. His story and his family.
Where it goes now is in Houston, but Russell Westbrook will at some point have a street in downtown Oklahoma City named for him… and rightfully so.
At the lowest point in Oklahoma City after the departure of Durant, the death of Aubrey McClendon, the plethora of earthquakes, and the cratering of oil prices…Russell Westbrook didn’t just have a steadying impact on the Thunder, he had a steadying influence on a state and how it felt about itself.
Russell gave Oklahomans something to cling onto and to help them feel good about themselves.
No, there won’t be a championship parade in Bricktown as the Russell Westbrook era has now ended in Oklahoma City. But there is a city which is still growing, still doing incredible things with MAPS, and still changing the manner in which it is perceived by the rest of the country.
Russell Westbrook should be extremely proud of what he did with his time in Oklahoma City. He wasn’t just the face of a franchise, but the face of a city.
This last season was bumpy to say the least. But bumps are just a part of the process.
Russell leaves for Houston, but unlike with Kevin Durant he departs as the favorite player in Oklahoma City even if it is with him playing in south Texas.
Russell Westbrook wasn’t born in Oklahoma, but in Los Angeles. He departs for Houston as our favorite son.