Hopefully…if you’ve been reading the pre-eminent Thunder underground blog in this market…you know precisely what the numbers allude to in my postgame formula analysis of the Thunder’s dramatic, thrilling Game 4 road win over the TWolves on Monday night.
I would blog at this juncture to date last night was the biggest win in the Thunder era in Oklahoma City minus perhaps the Game 6 home win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 6 at home.
But in the end…I would always lean to the road wins in Game 4 versus both the Denver Nuggets and these Minnesota TWolves as the best wins in Thunder history. Perhaps…several wins over the Zac Randolph, Marc Gasol, and Tony Allen Memphis Grizzlies would rank in my Top 5 Thunder post-season win list.
But I’ll write this…the AT&T Boys comng down the stretch in those last six minutes were stellar. Absolutely stellar on the offensive end of the court. I would think there’s some smilng faces in the AT&T marketing department today. They got it right…JDub and Chet rose to the occasion.
My Three Stars of the Game go in this order…1 JDub, 2 Shai, and 3 Chet.
Why JDub over Shai?
Because everyone, including MJ, pretty much knew Batman would show up in this game. Robin…we weren’t so sure about in the biggest road game of his NBA career. I loved the manner in which JDub carried the early game scoring burden before Shai got going and settled in with his offensive game…and of course Shai had 12 free throws, and was seemingly down on the floor every other Thunder possession with Little Nick Gallo running out onto the court with a chilled towel to dab Shai through the fatigue.
My numbers atop this postgame narrative go like this:
1 40-Shai’s point production
2 34-JDub’s point output
3 21-Chet’s total points
4 95-combined points from the Big 3
5 18-Thunder offensive rebounds
6 26- Minnesota turnovers
But most of all circle the 26 Minnesota turnovers. Before Game 1 was played… I introduced the number 14 as my barrier line of where the TWolves could not exceed if they expected to win games in this series.
Guess what game the Wolves stayed below that marker? Game 3 of course when they limited their turnovers to 10 and ran the Thunder off the court.
I watched Coach Finch’s postgame presser and I’m not going to post it on here today because it’s redundant.
I’ll just be blunt instead to the Minnesota TWolves…teams which are careless with the ball this time of the season and play loosely with the ball…usually don’t advance to the Finals.
So..I would write this for Coach Finch as well…if you guys don’t want Game 5 to be your last game of this post-season…I would highly suggest you take care of the ball and not exceed that 14 marker if you want to have any chance whatsover on Wednesday night.
All the complex math above made me think of one of my favorite songs of all-time. Hopefully…all this math puts me in a better metrics place with the millenial minimalists and Gen X’ers.
Mike J