It’s hard to figure the Thunder out. Do they want to tank or just do like they did last year and miss out on a top five draft pick?
The Thunder won last night in Detroit after trailing by as many as 18 points. For most of the game it looked the Thunder had a 9th straight loss in the bag…then in the fourth period the Thunder’s coach for some reason went with very heavy minutes with his four best players…Shai, Lu Dort, Kenrich Williams, and Mike Muscala.
The result was a Thunder 42 point fourth period which turned into a 114-103 road win for Oklahoma City.
It was interesting watching Cade Cunningham and Jerami Grant. It’s nice to see how their games are progressing. They both played well until the fourth period when the entire Piston team collapsed. Of course–in the elite circles of tanking teams like Detroit and Oklahoma City you never know what’s tanking and what’s the other team elevating it’s level of play. I have no idea how Vegas even begins to establish point spreads for games like this with two teams tanking shamelessly.
Cade had a great game going until the fourth period then he committed some bad turnovers which helped the Thunder earn its seventh win of the season. For the season the Thunder now stand at 7-16 somewhere floating around the bottom five of the entire NBA.
It’s hard to know what you should and shouldn’t take out of these games because you don’t when the game is an exhibition and when both sides of two tanking teams are actually trying to win… ot lose. Kind of like professional wrestling.
I’m not sure if my intial comparison of the Thunder to human sex traffickers would be the correct comparison when two equally bad tanking teams are trying to decide who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. Maybe in this situation it would like two rival mafia groups fighting for turf by whatever means. I don’t know… I need to think about it some more.
Shai had a nice 30 point, 13 assist game. Lu had a 28 point night. Mike Muscala did some nice things. Giddy here and there did some positive things, but I think even Michael Cage acknowledged the ceiling between Cade’s game and that of Josh Giddy isn’t the same.
And Kenrich had a great game. He’s my favorite Thunder player and he made his return from an ankle injury a good one as he scored 12 points and was game high for both teams at +22.
Kenrich is the one constant for me when I force myself to watch parts of a Thunder game nowadays. He obviously respects and loves the game.
OU hosts Butler on Wednesday… so I’ll be watching the Sooners play the Bulldogs in the Big 12-Big East Challenge while the Thunder stay on the road in the best NBA city in the league….that being Toronto of course.
I would think the two Canadian kids…Shai and Lu have some special type of tour scheduled for the other players.
I’ll do something on Mike’s Travel Blog….Toronto-wise.
Correction…the Sooners host Butler tonight. So that means I’ll have to adopt an NBA team for most of Wednesday night when Kenrich isn’t on the floor.