OKC in Minnesota tonight to cap a four game road trip against the 14-32 Timberwolves. Despite having the third worst record in the league–all is not hopeless as they possess some elite young talent in Andrew Wiggins, Karl Anthony-Towns, and Zach LaVine. A group who makes it somewhat easy to think back to the early days of Durant, Westbrook, and Harden when the Thunder were trying figure out how to win regular season games in a 23-59 inaugural season.
Same thing with this Minnesota team as they’re still in the process of learning how to win games. Wolves have some additional talented players in Shabazz Muhummad, Gorgui Dieng, Nikola Pekovic, Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin, and Kevin Garnett. So there’s enough there to win some games.
OKC comes in at 34-13, but given what we’ve seen of late from the Thunder it wouldn’t be implausible for the Thunder to get beat in this game if they can’t elicit some emotion and focus. Minnesota is one of the league’s worst three point shooting teams so that lessens the concern a bit, but anything is possible from this Thunder team as far as being defensively inconsistent. Or would it be more to the point saying they’re consistently inconsistent. Whatever.
Enes Kanter comes off what I think was his worse performance this season. So you’d think the thought is he’ll bounce back and provide some bench points against the Wolves.
With the Blake Griffin mess in Los Angeles, it would appear OKC won’t be under any pressure to sustain the No. 3 seed, but again, with this OKC team, presuming anything might be dangerous.