This loss doesn’t really shock me because at some point Karl Anthony-Townes, Andrew Wiggins, and Coach Tom Thibodeau are going to get it figured out and become a pretty decent basketball team. Who knows, maybe it might even start to happen with more frequency the second half of this basketball season.
The T Wolves beat the Thunder on Friday night at home for their third straight win, and for those who don’t follow the NBA as a whole the Wolves have now beaten James Harden and Russell Westbrook in successive games. I picked the Wolves to be an 11th or 12th place team or so in West ‘this year’, but once Thibodeau figures out what he wants to do with his point guard position, I think it’s pretty clear Karl-Anthony Townes and Andrew Wiggins are two guys you can build a team around.
I guess at some point in this recap I have to write about how bad the Thunder were on Friday night in Minnesota. Fairly bad, but more to the point, Russell Westbrook and Steven Adams were awful. When Westbrook and Adams are both bad on the same night I’m not really sure there’s a current team in the NBA this Thunder can beat, albeit on a Karl Anthony-Townes night where he feasted on the Thunder for 29 points and 17 rebounds. Wiggins was just so-so, but with Zach Lavine out with an injury, even Ricky Rubio lit up the Thunder on this night.
This Thunder team can’t win games unless Westbrook and Adams play well, end of story. Russell Westbrook did garner his 19th triple double of the season with a 21 point, 11 rebound, 12 assist night, but he also had ten turnovers and was a putrid 1-10 shooting threes. Russell Westbrook shot 7-23 from the field, while the Thunder had 19 assists coupled with 18 turnovers. More to the point, Steven Adams only had FIVE SHOT attempts the entire game. None of that equals a win in the NBA.
Even more to the point, Alex Abrines and Jerami Grant between them didn’t score a point much less make a three. On the night, the Thunder were an abysmal, brutally bad 3-20 shooting threes. On a whole, the Thunder shot 38.8% from the field. Again the Thunder were collectively horrible on the offensive end, but I put most of this on Russell Westbrook because we’ve talked about this before, namely the ball has to move for this team to have a chance, it can’t just be Westbrook chucking threes when he’s pretty much a career 30% shooter from beyond the arc. This isn’t complex. Minnesota only scored 96 points in this game. It’s not like 97 points by the Thunder is an unreasonable goal against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
But like I wrote at the top, it’s not as if this loss really shocks me because overall the margin is narrow for this Thunder team on any night and Karl Anthony-Townes is an exceptionally talented player.
The Thunder drop to 3-4 in the month of January and now have five more in a row on the road before they see friendly fans again in Chesapeake Energy Arena on January 26th versus the Dallas Mavericks.
Next up the Thunder in Sacramento on Sunday night after the Packers-Cowboys divisional playoff game at Jerry’s World. Go Aaron Rodgers! Go Russell Westbrook!