The Thunder lost like they were supposed to in Utah on Wednesday night. The alleged four best players on the team…. Shai, Lu Dort, Josh Giddy, and I guess Darius Bazely all had a tough night.
The Thunder not only lost, but they lost by 21 points which covered the Vegas spread of the Jazz winning by 13.5 at home against one of the worst teams in the league.
The other gem in Sam Presti’s master plan… the skinny kid named Poku didn’t even score a point as he looked terrified to attempt a shot.
Coach D with his ears probably still stinging from the ass chewing he got from Sam Presti for winning those two late season games against Boston and the LA Clippers was in mid-season tanking form as he kept two of his better three point shooters, Mike Muscala and Ty Jerome, on the bench.
Granted…Utah is picked by some to win the West and their rim is protected by Rudy Gobert, it was still a stellar clinic on how to tank on Day 1.
I could only watch bits and pieces of the game. It was pathetic. But again…Utah is a good regular season team and the Thunder by plan have been built to be terrible.
I wonder if Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town needs a counter balance of sorts with a story of how the ‘It Team in America’ for a decade has turned itself into a franchise taking this route to attempt to stay relevant.
I was also wondering what Shai Gilgeous Alexander’s agent was thinking to himself as he tried to watch more than five minutes of this game.
I wonder if there were any questions in the post game presser from any of the OKC media as to why Mike Muscala and Ty Jerome didn’t get into the game to shoot threes with Rudy Gobert packing the lane as he always does.
This is what I mean by these games not being legitimate competition. They’re staged events design for the Thunder to lose.
I thought the three rookies… Josh Giddy, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, and Tre Mann and my favorite vet Kenrich Williams were the four best players on the floor for the Thunder. They actually looked like they belonged in an NBA game.
Glass half-full take there’s only 81 games left in the season.
On a more positive note…a friend gave me a copy of John Grisham’s basketball novel ‘Sooley’ this past week and I finished it yesterday morning.
This was the first basketball novel I’ve ever read and I loved it. It made me laugh and it made me cry. The ending caught me off guard and has left me still thinking of the main character Sooley and his legacy to readers.
John Grisham usually writes legal thriller novels, but this is the fourth sports novel he’s written.
He’s written two football novels ‘Playing for Pizza’ and ‘Bleachers’. Plus one baseball novel titled ‘Calico Joe’.
If you need to take a break from the tanking…I’d highly recommend ‘Sooley’. Although the character Sooley is from South Sudan..I couldn’t help but keep thinking of Serge Ibaka and that infectious smile of his as I read the book.
As time has passed from the Thunder’s better days… Nick, Serge, and Steven have cemented themselves with me as my three favorite players.
Hang in there with the tank and do some leisure reading during the Thunder games this season. You won’t be missing much by taking your eyes off the court. Maybe it will even put all of this into some sort of cosmic karma balance.