Author: Mike

Great question when you weigh the $6 million the Thunder will pay Billy Donovan next season after Sam Presti prematurely re-upped his coach this December when the Thunder were enjoying the easiest schedule in the NBA.

It made no sense then and it makes less sense now.

Here’s a number for you as in 43-31. That’s right —that’s what the Thunder’s record was at this point last season and this season after 74 games. Having or not having Carmelo Anthony on the roster has not made any real difference.

Here’s another number…6-12. That’s the Thunder’s record since the road loss in New Orleans. Put this in perspective…in the history of this franchise in OKC…only the inaugural 23-59 team had a worse record than this after the All-Star break.

Here’s more numbers. OKC leads the entire NBA in technical fouls received and leads the entire NBA in fewest passes per game with 240 team passes per game.

The Thunder since the break are one of the worst offensive and defensive teams in the league.

By my purely non-scientific take the Thunder are also the dumbest team in the league with a penchant for self torture at just the wrong moments.

This isn’t just one thing…it’s systemic.

Does firing Billy Donovan solve the problem?

No… not by itself because the problem is a lack of leadership from Russell Westbrook and Paul George.

This isn’t real sports…this NBA thing. Its only a real thing in San Antonio where players actually listen to their coach. The Warriors actually had a better winning percentage with Luke Walton and Mike Brown than they have with Steve Kerr. Really—if Kerr just showed up for the playoffs they’d probably have a better regular season record.

The NBA is not a coach driven league, it’s a star/agent driven league. So good luck finding the person Russell Westbrook will listen to for 82 games and change.

But Billy Donovan should be coaching for his job these next few weeks. The question is who would you hire that Russell Westbrook would listen to?

I’ve read some real bullshit from some of the locals this season on this yo yo ride of a season. And.. I’ve also read and heard some people at least make an attempt to somewhat tell it like it is. I no have sympathy for the in essence defacto Thunder ’employees’ who basically don’t go far beyond toting the company line.

I know it’s a one major league sport market, but some of what I’ve read this season is just basically weak.

Yet…at the top of the list some people are at least making an effort to be objective.

I’ve combined both print and radio on my poll as to who I enjoy reading or listening to. I did not include local television sportscasters on my poll.

So…basically—this is who I’ve enjoyed reading or listening to this season:

1 Jim Traber (This is a true sign of my aging in that Traber has won me over…easily–I might add. Most entertaining person in the market.)

2 Mark Rodgers ( A millennial, but an honest one. He’s always saying the things I’m thinking. He must be reading my blog. Smart kid if that’s the case.)

3 Dusty D (I love Dusty and he was a friend of my dad. He has a bright future in sports broadcasting).

4 Barry Tramel ( Note on Tramel—he’s the only person at the pressers with a set of balls to at least ask the obvious tough questions).

5 Erik Horne ( He’ll stick his nose in there, but needs to free wheel more with his writing, but I know he’s not a hopeless homer).

6 Antonio Daniels ( I need to see more, but he’s the only person on Fox I ‘ll listen to at all. He’s the best dresser in the market. I should prolly have Antonio higher.)

7 Maddie Lee (She’s new to the market, yet I’ve read some of her stuff and she actually will ask some non-homer questions and seems like a cute chick.)

8 Jenni Carlson Jenni will at least challenge the Thunder company line unlike some. She doesn’t ask stupid questions at the pressers either).

9 Little Nick Gallo Hey…what can I say? Everybody in their heart kind of loved Sean Spicer. Surely—he’s doing a brilliant parody of himself…right?

10 Mike Jackson The eclectic rogue blogger at okcthunderground.com who at the least doesn’t suck on the Thunder tit 24/7.

That’s my Top Ten. But there’s also some very creative bloggers on various other Thunder blogs and message boards I enjoy as well. But don’t give me the Thunder home cooking just to be doing so. In the immortal words of Howard Cosell…”Tell it like it is.”

This is difficult to write, but I’ll be brief and to the point. The Thunder with two days rest and desperately in need of a win to stay in the chase for a No. 4 or 5 seed in the West fell flat with one of the worst performances in the history of the franchise from my view.

The final score was 114-103. This was a Memphis team which came into the game with a record of 29-44. This was a Memphis team which was sitting six players and had a makeshift NBA roster on the court.

There’s no point in really going into the game per se because the effort was so poor on multiple fronts it hurts as a fan or even as an objective blogger to write about the game. I guess there will be some on some outlets who make an excuse. I can’t do that on here. The game and the effort made me ill.

The Thunder drop to 8th in the West and will still hold on enough to make the NBA playoffs for one round. AS an NBA fan, in all honesty, if this is the effort the Thunder are going to exert then I’d rather see the young Sacramento Kings play the Warriors and at least give it an honest effort.

I’d try and write more, but I don’t know what you write when you witness an effort this poor on a night the Thunder were healthy, rested and in need of a win in the worst way against an inferior opponent.

The Thunder host Indiana on Wednesday night inside the Peake.

I thought it was excellent. Of course…I cried. Older guys cry a lot…that’s just the way it is because you’ve traveled the journey and see things through a different stage of life.

Even Jim Traber cries quite a bit and I was relieved to hear him say this just the other day on the air. So…it’s no big deal to cry.

What made Oklahomans embrace a player so closely who has a career scoring average of six points a game?

I think it’s a combination of his decency, his fierce work ethic, his smarts, his team first mantra and the fact I never once felt Nick Collison was conning us either on or off the court. He gave what he had and you knew he’d do anything to give his team an edge.

Plus, he has the heart of a human champion.

I hope to see Nick Collison in coaching like his father at some point.

Just when you were ready to throw in the towel for this Thunder basketball season the Thunder responded with their best 17 minute stretch of play this basketball season since maybe before the All-Star break.

Another loss would have been devastating to the whole feel of the season and seemed probable after another lethargic first half of play. But finally somewhere around the mid-point in the third period… the Thunder found some heart and played at a high level of basketball which if they could bottle would take them on a nice playoff run this spring.

As wasn’t the case two nights ago in OKC– in these last 17 minutes the Thunder did everything right and didn’t look like the Bad News Bears.

They made stops. They made free throws. They made threes. They got to the loose balls first. They did the big and little things and they got it from four guys who were doing this the before the All-Star Break, but not as much after the break.

Paul George was the MVP candidate again. He brought his big boy game. He led and steadied the team when it needed balance. PG scored 28 points on 17 shots and was 5-10 from the field.

Dennis Schroder was once again the player I had hanging around Lou Williams for the Sixth Man of the Year award before he experienced the joy of becoming a father. Schroder was my MVP in this game. He brought his A game and when he brings this game to the arena the Thunder are a different animal. Schroder had 26 points, 6 rebounds and 7 assists.

Jerami Grant added 19 points on five made threes and for the Thunder to get beyond the first round he needs to be this type of player. Grant has been on a roll of late and when he gives the Thunder this type of production it helps Russell Westbrook make better decisions.

Terrance Ferguson had been slumping since the break, but chipped in with 11 points and went 3-7 shooting threes. This is what the Thunder need from Ferguson. Namely—someone to make several threes and play some respectable defense.

Russell Westbrook tripled doubled for the 28th time, but more importantly seemed calmer and in a better place with decision making even though he struggled shooting the ball on a 6-20 night.

The Thunder improve to 43-30 and for the time being are still the 5th seed in the West with a road game on Monday night in Memphis the next game up.

At this point all of the seeding in the West is still up in the air because if you haven’t noticed the Denver Nuggets with nine games are tied for first with the Golden State Nuggets.

My advice to the Thunder is not to worry about the seeding and just bear down for 48 minutes and this will take care of itself.

Actually, by simply being idle, the fading Thunder jumped from No. 8 to No. 5 in the Western Conference standings last night. It was one of the better nights of the season for the Thunder since the All-Star break by simply not playing.

I feel better. If only the Thunder could just somehow avoid having to play these ten games I’d feel even better.

Amazingly, OKC, San Antonio, Utah and the Clippers are in a dead heat as we wind down these final few weeks of the regular season. I think to project how this winds down for the Thunder as far as seeding would drive any sane person into an insane person at this point.

OKC is in Toronto tonight for the flip flop game with the Raptors. Vegas has Toronto favored at -2 .5. The Raptors for the second straight game will be without starting point guard Kyle Lowery.

There was quite a bit of talk yesterday on OKC sports radio in regards to Billy Donovan and the extension he received in December for next season. My feeling is obvious, he shouldn’t have received the extension and this season should be the grading season for Billy Donovan’s future in Oklahoma City.

But this season still has ten regular season games and at least one playoff series left before we fully understand where this Thunder season falls in relation to Billy Donovan’s four overall seasons in Oklahoma City as an NBA head coach.

This blog entry requires human decency and a bit of a kinder, gentler approach. Besides, it was Nick Collison Night and the game versus the pretty good Toronto Raptors was an afterthought.

Everyone in Oklahoma besides Little Nick Gallo knows where this Thunder season is headed–so there’s no need for me to lack sensitivity per se. It is what it is.

For the second straight season it appears the Thunder with the nicest Ward Cleaver-like coach in the NBA will be a huge disappointment as we near the real NBA season in April.

With OKC’s most recent loss since February 14th, in New Orleans–this one being a 123-114 overtime loss to the Raptors, the Thunder have done the unthinkable and dropped from second to eighth place in the Western Conference standings.

During this span of sixteen games the Thunder are a collective 5-11 and quite honestly appear to be one of the worst teams in the NBA since the All-Star break. It’s not just one thing. The Thunder just suck collectively. From their head coach to their two stars to their role players to their bench to their media relations people—the Thunder suck across the board.

Take this game as a brief microcosm. Russell Westbrook did have 42 points, but he also had 8 turnovers. Paul George was nothing special in a huge game with a 19 point performance and dropped below Nicola Jokic on my MVP vote list. Combined—Steven Adams, Jerami Grant, Terrance Ferguson and Dennis Schroder went a combined 13-47 from the field.

But here’s the most glaring sign of overall Thunder lack of attention to detail—they shot 15-29 from the free throw line. So my question to Russell Westbrook and Paul George would be, “Even if you got every call what difference would it make?”

The Thunder just aren’t very good and the easy first third of the season schedule masked so much of what we’ve seen since the schedule got tough.

You don’t play Memphis, Phoenix, Cleveland and the NY Knicks in the playoffs. This Thunder in the current tense is who the Thunder are unfortunately against playoff caliber competition. The Divine Miracle in Philly snookered us.

For a reason which completely escapes me, Sam Presti, and I wrote it several times back when it happened, extended Billy Donovan another year for next season in Oklahoma City. I’m not sure if I ever remember a coach being extended then being fired, but it is what is in Oklahoma City NBA wise.

On a positive side, the Toronto Raptors have a nice team apparently ready to make some noise in the highly anticipated Eastern Conference Playoffs. Their starting five with the addition of Marc Gasol and the star emergence of Pascal Siakem is impressive. They run the court. They move the ball. They finish…and in essence do all the things coach Nick Nurse asks of them on a nightly basis for the most part.

The really bad news for the Thunder is they just went 0-3 on a critical home stand and now travel to play these same Raptors on Friday night.

There won’t be any outburst or snarky writing from me on here. The truth is evident. The Thunder just aren’t that good.

Simply put, Nick is my favorite Thunder of player all-time. I don’t know who my second favorite player is as of this moment in that I love role players and what they give to a team. Maybe if Andre could ever make a free throw…he’d become my second favorite Thunder player in the Thunder era.

From the first time I watched Nick play at Kansas it was obvious his father was a coach. The attitude, the toughness and the off the chart BBIQ made it clear his father had coached him. Roy Williams landed a champion when Nick decided to spend his college career in Lawrence.

Of course, as an OU fan, I hated when they beat us, but with Collison it was always about respect and admiration for the way in which he carried himself both on and off the court.

Nick Collison wasn’t a star. For his NBA career he averaged 6 points a game and 1.4 assists a game. He was a bear on the boards and a tenacious defender.

Yet having written this, Nick was the 12th player taken in the 2003 draft by the Seattle Sonics. All of Nick Collison’s fifteen years in the NBA were with the same franchise both in Seattle and in Oklahoma City. He never made an All-Star team or won an MVP award.

He was a master of the two man game with James Harden in both 2011 and 2012. With Harden and Collison on the floor together their offensive games meshed and it was a clinic in moving without the ball followed by the textbook backdoor pass.

He was also a master of drawing the charge and the image of a Memphis player crashing into the planted Collison is indelibly printed in every Thunder fan’s soul.

Collison was also the most interesting and accessible Thunder player in the press room. Talk to people at the Children’s Hospital in downtown Oklahoma City and you’ll hear some stories which had nothing to do with the hard wood, but everything to do with the nature of his heart as a human.

But most of all Collison was/is a class act and the model of what every NBA owner would want from one of his players on and off the court.

I still cry when I think about the Thunder beating the Spurs in Game 6 to advance to the NBA Finals. It’s something no real Thunder fan will ever forget.

Nick Collison is a part of all this which will never be forgotten and if you took a poll he’d be the most popular figure in the history of the Thunder franchise.

Nick Collison Night tonight inside the Peake will be a memorable experience for all involved. I doubt there will be a dry eye in the house.

Don’t look now, but the superbly coached San Antonio Spurs beat Golden State last night for their 9th win a row and passed the gasping Thunder for the No. 5 seed in the West. Utah and the gritty Clippers are now one game down in the loss column to the train wreck Thunder who are now 5-10 since the loss in New Orleans.

This season under Florida Gator coach Billy Donovan was supposed to be different than the previous one in which it was alleged Carmelo Anthony torpedoed the Thunder by refusing to come off the bench.

That was the narrative following Carmelo’s hellbent exit interview at the conclusion of last season. That being, it was pretty much all Carmelo’s fault the Thunder were a season long dud and a relatively easy victim for the Utah Jazz in Round 1.

So here we stand… seventy-one NBA regular season games later and the Thunder in reality appear no different than last season’s smoldering heap of junk which made it appear Kevin Durant and his handlers were prescient in getting out of town and taking the easy path to two NBA rings.

There was no Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City tonight as he was suspended for getting his 18th technical of the season as two had already been rescinded.

The final score read 116-107 in favor of the sub .500 Miami Heat who are now 34-36 and fighting to hold on to the 8th seed in the East.

The mercurial peacock Westbrook will return on Wednesday night for the Thunder. It will be Nick Collison Night as the Thunder organization tries to take a sentimental view back towards what the Thunder were in 2012 when Collison, Perk, Serge, Thabo, Durant, Harden, Fisher, Maynor and Westbrook caught the fascination of the world by reaching the NBA Finals versus D Wade and LeBron’s super team in Miami.

But on this night inside the Peake a laid back crowd didn’t get to see the Thunder without Westbrook change the direction of their season as the Heat after a slow start came back to score 116 points and make the Thunder look like a lottery team.

It was Wade’s last appearance in OKC and he didn’t disappoint as he scored 25 points and along with point guard Goran Dragic’s 26 points stuck the knife just a little deeper into the gut of the reeling team with the Love’s billboard posted on their collective chests.

The Love’s logo is a huge red heart. How ironic… for a team without any collective heart that this should be the sponsorship logo on their jerseys.

The Thunder resume action on Wednesday night inside the Peake to honor Nick Collison. Maybe Sam Presti will announce Nick’s addition to the coaching staff in as it appears little if any coaching takes place with the dumbest team in the NBA.

That’s what I always admired about Collison…his smarts, his toughness and his willingness to do anything to help the team win a game.

The Thunder host the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night and will be honoring Nick Collison.

Back in the day when John Feinstein wrote Season on the Brink–I bought the book in hard copy and loved it. It was quite the rage as a NY Times bestseller. My wife had a friend who was the sister of Bobby Knight’s second wife and just by accident I found out she was getting ready to spend a week in Bloomington with Bob Knight. I politely asked if she would take my book with her and see if Coach Knight would sign it for me.

She came back with my book unsigned and told me Coach Knight wouldn’t sign the book because he now hated John Feinstein. She gave me my book and then gave me another hard cover book which had just been released by the title of Bob Knight: His Own Man by Joan Mellon. It turns out Joan Mellon was an English Lit prof at Temple and she and Coach Knight did this book in response to the book in which Coach Knight gave complete access to John Feinstein to write in the first place. I opened the book and there’s Coach Knight’s signature inside the book with a note which read: ‘Mike, You shouldn’t have wasted your time reading the first book. This is the better book.’ -Bob Knight-

I use this in my lead for today as for the second straight season the Thunder’s season appears to be clearly on the brink. Since February 14th, the Thunder are 5-9 and falling fast. As I look at the standings this morning the Thunder are in the No. 5 seed and on the cusp of falling further if things don’t take a turn for the Thunder in their remaining twelve games of the regular season. San Antonio, Utah and even the inspirational LA Clippers are all still winning and not going away.

So what happened? Was it just the schedule getting tougher and the Thunder coming back to the norm of what they really are with Russell Westbrook as star and college coach Billy Donovan running the ship?

I’m not sure. I don’t have access like John Feinstein did with Bobby Knight back when Knight was an icon with the Hoosiers. From the outside looking in though– it appears Russell Westbrook, not Clay Bennett, is the primary owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder franchise. It appears Westbrook drives the bus and Sam Presti and Clay Bennett go along because they fear they have no other option at this point.

I don’t know what else to write at this point.

What other conclusion could you draw after the dismissal of Brian Davis for the ‘cotton pickin’ mind’ comment or the ascension of Little Nick Gallo as some sort of personal communications guru for Westbrook himself?

I cannot fathom in any alternate universe how Clay Bennett or Sam Presti think this is a good look for an NBA franchise even for one in Oklahoma City.

So how would Bob Knight handle Russell Westbrook is how I tie all this together? Bob Knight actually won one of his national championships with a point guard from Chicago by the name of Isiah Thomas. Oh, they had their moments–but they did win a national championship before Isiah went on to the Detroit Pistons.

But in the year 2019… could a coach like Bob Knight rein in Westbrook the Peacock and keep his point guard’s attention focused on winning a championship?

I don’t know. But I feel certain Billy Donovan can’t handle his peacock of a point guard and this season is clearly on the brink with Carmelo Anthony nowhere in sight.

The Thunder host the Heat tonight in another goodbye game for D Wade on his farewell tour. Of course, Westbrook is suspended due to receiving his 16th technical in the blowout loss to the Warriors after body checking Klay Thompson when a call didn’t go his way. Ironically, that was the only time in the game Westbrook appeared to be close enough to either Thompson or Curry to offer much resistance.

Every game is big for the Thunder at this point unless they want to fall to the No. 8 seed.

The Miami Heat and D Wade in town tonight at the Peake .Maybe Wade could explain to Westbrook if he weren’t suspended what it takes to become a three time NBA champion.