Month: March 2019

What an absolute piece of dogshit officiating in LA tonight where the feel good Clippers defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder by a final margin of 118-110.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time this season I’ve even mentioned officiating one way or another. I’ve harped on Billy Donovan being the Ward Cleaver of NBA coaches. I’ve harped about Little Nick Gallo being the obvious successor to Sarah Huckabee- Sanders in the Trump White House. And, of course, pretty much every game I bitch about the Thunder being one of the league’s underachievers for the second straight season…only this time without Carmelo Anthony.

But tonight I m going to talk about officiating…as in this was the worst I’ve seen this season in an NBA game. Let’s put aside the fact the Clippers were 26-34 from the line while the Thunder were 17-26. That doesn’t even bother me because on the second night of a brutal road back to back I expected the Thunder starters to be tired and probably not moving their feet at times in the game. They were tired and their feet didn’t move at times.

But here’s the thing on this night when Westbrook, George, and Adams all fouled out–the sixth fouls on both Paul George and Russell Westbrook were absolute bullshit calls. I’m a tough critic on my blog at times on the Thunder, but again I feel I need to be given the fact Big 12 writers and college writers who cover this team in this market aren’t exactly what I would describe as shall we say… experience tested objective.

When I coached hockey I stood up for my players and if this was my team tonight in LA I would have been ejected after the sixth foul calls on either Paul George or Russell Westbrook. I might even be in jail right now. For sure…I’d be getting a heavy fine at the least. Both calls were horrific and basically negated any chance in the last three minutes for the Thunder to steal a road win on the second night of a difficult back to back.

As far as the game went…OKC was a Vegas 2.5 underdog and rightfully so. The Thunder aren’t as good as we hoped they’d turn out to be and the gritty Clippers are along with Denver and Indiana one of the genuinely feel good stories in the NBA this season. I admire the effort and grit this Clippers team has shown NBA fans all season long and I applaud their team character and grit.

But still, those two calls were absolute bullshit.

Before I close out…I thought the Thunder bench showed some fight in the third period and that’s a positive. Markieff Morris appears to be rounding into some sort of reasonable basketball shape and that’s a positive. I love grinders…and Abdel Nader is winning my heart with his ‘grindiness’. If the Thunder were smart they’d have some sort of award called ‘The Collison’ which publicly recognizes the importance of your team grinder.

One more game left on this brutal western road swing and that one is on Monday evening in Salt Lake City where the Jazz and their fans very much realize this is a line in the sand game for their season if they want to climb into the fifth or fourth seed in the West by season’s end. It will be a war. It will be like in Portland with the playoff-like setting.

I’d guess OKC will be a 4 to 4.5 Vegas road underdog.

I can’t wait for these type of games. This is why you either play or coach sports. You want to compete.

The Thunder need to compete on Monday and maybe get a little love from the zebras as well.

This will be the second obit I’ve written in my life. The first was the one I wrote on behalf of my father.

It saddened me to observe the passing of legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins this morning. He didn’t die at the age of 89. No, that didn’t happen here. Dan Jenkins will merely move along and pop up somewhere else in the cosmos as one of the funniest novelists and sports writers of the ages.

And yet, as I write this, I realize Dan Jenkins wasn’t just a golf writer at Golf Digest. He was a writer who would write on any subject or any sport and do it with a deftness of keyboard or typewriter which always left me ready to read his next book or article before it was already written.

Dan Jenkins was god-like to me. He got me in trouble in my 11th grade American Lit class when I was supposed to be reading The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn during a class reading session. Not me. I had a copy of Jenkins’ pro football novel Semi-Tough hidden behind the assigned book. My teacher, a tough seventy-year old named Juanita Elijah, came down my aisle and discovered what I was up to. She was a tough no nonsense national teacher of the year winner and you didn’t do things like this in her class. She took my book away from me and told me she was going to drop my semester grade at least one letter grade.

A week later, she approached me after class when no one was around. She handed me the book and said, “Michael, I’m not going to drop your grade. I enjoyed the book.” She correctly figured at least I was reading on my own… period….even if the characters were Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller and Barbara Jane Bookman instead of an old man battling a fish on the open sea. Hence there and then…Dan Jenkins and Juanita Elijah fostered my love of reading.

In his prime at Sports Illustrated, Jenkins was the guy who covered the Super Bowl, the Final Four, and the Masters. These were his events to write about in an age of sports which seems almost laughably innocent compared to what we witness in the present day.

His writing style was a combination of keen insight paired with a subtle sense of humor which at times could leave you laughing hysterically.

Maybe it was the fact Dan Jenkins was a Texas guy who was born in Fort Worth and attended TCU back in the day when the Horn Frogs were one of the college football elites which drew me to his writing. Jenkins was one of these guys with a slow Texas drawl with the insights of a Harvard PhD. He never wanted to let you know just how smart he was, but if you kept reading his work you came to understand how smart he was.

He wrote books. Both novels and non-fiction. Four of his novels will always rank in my heart where I store places for pieces of writing I hold close to my soul.

He wrote about the side of the NFL we never knew about in Semi-Tough. He wrote about the U.S. Open golf tournament in Dead Solid Perfect when an unknown from Ft. Worth named Kenny Lee made it thru the qualifying rounds to win the Open. He wrote about surviving cancer with someone you love in Life It’s Own Self. And he wrote about what it’s like to live in a place like Texas in Baja Oklahoma.

Maybe in retrospect, it was the Texas touch in Jenkins which made a kid living in Oklahoma love him so.

He’s moved along. But I hope in this age of the 24/7 news cycle a reader here and there will still find Jenkins relevant in our current state of mind.

I love Dan Jenkins.

This is Dan’s daughter… Sally Jenkins. She’s an accomplished writer in her own right. She’s a sports columnist for the Washington Post and like her father, she’s quite a writer. I’ve read three of her books… It’s Not About the Bike: The Lance Armstrong Story, The State of Jones (non-fiction Civil War historical), and The Pat Summit Story. You see, I just can’t get enough of hoops and history…two of my passions. Here’s Sally discussing the book she wrote about legendary coach Pat Summit of Tennessee.

I loved the game last night. This was a playoff basketball game setting. Keep in mind this was the first Thunder road win since February 3rd. I like the fact OKC pulled together and finally embraced a street fight mentality and didn’t play like they were entitled to anything.

It’s just one game, but my hope is this is the spot where the half assed bullshit stops this season and this marks the beginning of an attitude for this team. A team which should be embarrassed about their first round exit to Utah last season.

The fact Westbrook and Paul George took so many shots doesn’t bother me all that much. They came through when they had to. Other guys chipped in as needed. Adams, Grant, Ferguson, Schroder and Markieff Morris did some nice things.

I thought it was one of Billy Donovan’s better games. He coached it like a playoff game. If you doubt me take a close look at the box and examine the minutes.

What I really liked though was he realized the defensive liability Dennis Schroder has been of late and sat him the last ten minutes of the game. Yet, I think he still played Schroder enough earlier in the game to not crater what Schroder can still add to this team if you are careful not to play him too many minutes with Westbrook.

At this time of the year it’s about defense, stops and execution on the offensive end.

Westbrook had a bad turnover night, yet I thought the rest of his game was excellent and amidst all of what happened last night Westbrook amazingly didn’t pick up a technical.

The Westbrook vs. Lillard duel was classic. You just hope Westbrook has something left in the tank tonight versus the Clippers.

Clippers tonight in Staples. This game is pretty big as well.

Let’s hope this is the catalyst for a run of good play heading into the goal achieving portion of the season.

There have been some huge Thunder wins this season with the Divine Intervention in Philly and the epic double overtime win over the Jazz leading the list, but this win in Portland could very well be the biggest as far as season changing momentum and playoff seeding for the Thunder.This was a game Oklahoma City absolutely had to have to slant the seeding math in their favor to secure home court in the first round. If you looked at the standings and examined the final five weeks left on the schedule this was the game the Thunder needed in the worst way on this brutal four game western road swing.

Mission accomplished.

This was playoff basketball in its purist sense for the Thunder. The starters went heavy on the minutes. The bench was used more sparingly. Dennis Schroder for defensive reasons never saw the floor in the final ten minutes of play. Westbrook played 40 minutes, Paul George played 43 minutes.

This was a game for the stars on both teams standing front and center with the role players understanding this in a sense was a seeding game.

Westbrook scored 37 points on a 14-28 night. Paul George scored 32 points and went 17-20 from the line. Combined they gave Billy Donovan 69 points and a truckload of leadership from wire to wire. This is what your stars are supposed to do in playoff basketball.

Damian Lillard scored 51 points. McCullom added 25 points. Combined they had 76 points, but the Thunder did a good job with the rest of the Blazer roster.

Maurice Harkless had only two points. Nurkic was held in check with 13 points. Enes Kanter only managed 3 points and in no way mitigated the defensive liability he still is as an NBA player.

This game had everything. It was chippy. The Thunder played with an edge. Westbrook dumped Nurkic on the floor from behind. Paul George stung Nurkic with an elbow to the jaw which led to the game’s biggest play minutes later as Nurkic was ejected for head butting George.

Billy Donovan was right on the mark managing the minutes in the game. His rotations made sense. He knows his defense is a sieve with Westbrook and Schroder paired together…and they were never together the final ten minutes of this game.

The Thunder leave Portland at 40-25 with sole possession of the No. 4 seed still in their pocket plus a 4-0 series sweep of the Blazers.The Thunder in LA tomorrow night to play the second night of a road back to back. The goal on this four game road swing was to go 2-2. With a win either in LA or Salt Lake City the Thunder can take a deep breath and regroup for the final 15 regular season games.

I have to admit with the Thunder sinking like the Titanic my attention is easily diverted to other things. Of course, Sean Spicer was Trump’s first enabler, but I still always kind of liked Spicer if for nothing else his sense of humor.

So as I observe Russell Westbrook continually troll the Oklahoma local media with Nick Gallo nuzzled up next to him like his pet puppy…it does make me somewhat see Sean Spicer’s face superimposed on Little Nick Gallo’s body during these Oklahoma City Thunder postgame pressers.

I love the opening skits on SNL and if the Thunder season does go all the way south…we at least have to be able to have a sense of humor and laugh at ourselves at times.

I see a lot of Nick Gallo in Sean Spicer and if you can be Russell Westbrook’s press secretary…then I’m thinking the Trump people might want to keep Nick Gallo in mind whenever Sarah Huckabee-Sanders gets fired.

In a span of eight games I’ve dropped Oklahoma from No. 2 to No. 9 and out of my top eight. The Thunder since early January rank as the third worst defensive team in the NBA along with lottery teams Phoenix and the NY Knicks. I would think tonight in Portland is a fairly important game with road games coming up against the trending LA Clippers and Utah Jazz following this one.

1 Golden State Warriors

2 Houston Rockets

3 Milwaukee Bucks

4 Toronto Raptors

5 Philadelphia 76’ers

6 Boston Celtics

7 Denver Nuggets

8 Indiana Pacers

One of my favorite coaches in the NBA is Terry Stotts. It’s not only that I think he’s good coach, but’s there’s a sentimental attachment with me as well from Terry Stott’s college playing days at the University of Oklahoma when I was a college kid.

Terry Stotts was one of the primary cogs of the ’78-79 OU team coached by Dave Bliss which went on to win OU’s first ever Big 8 championship. That team is clearly one of my favorite basketball teams of all-time because of not only winning the Big 8, but they then went to advance to the Sweet 16. This was the first time at OU in my youth these team goals were attained by an OU basketball team. Although, of course in 1947, OU made the national championship game against a Holy Cross team on which Bob Cousy played.

The ’78-79 OU team was a special team for me because they weren’t all that talented, but they played extremely smart basketball and as one as a team. Clearly, an overachiever. OU advanced to the Sweet 16 by defeating legendary Abe Lemons’ Texas Longhorn team. OU was eliminated in the NCAA by none other than one Larry Bird and the Indiana State Sycamores. As we all know…Indiana State went on to play Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans. This was back when mens’ college ball was special.

Coach Dave Bliss had been an assistant at Army and Indiana with Bob Knight before taking the OU job. Consequently, the team had a real Indiana high school feel about it as several kids from Indiana came with Bliss to OU.

I still remember the core players…. Terry Stotts, John McCullough (MVP), Cary Carrabine, Al Beal (Deerfield Beach, Florida), Lester Pace and Raymond ‘Juice’ Whitley.

Stotts was what I would describe as a very heady small forward swing player who was a good shooter and tenacious competitor.

I’d love to have him coach the Thunder at some point. I would think he’d be a guy Clay Bennett would be good with as well.

Stotts earned his bachelors in zoology and MBA from OU. Tell me…he wouldn’t be a fit here. He coached in the CBA and was an assistant on the 2011 iconic Dallas Mavs championship team coached by Rick Carlisle. He clearly paid his dues before getting the Portland job.

Who knows…maybe some day Terry Stotts might coach the Thunder.

On this frigid dismal night in the Arctic tundra, the Thunder not only were walloped by Karl Anthony-Townes, but their reality made even worse as the healthy Houston Rockets zoomed past them for the No. 3 seed in the West.

Houston may or may not catch the slumping Nuggets for the No. 2 seed, but as the Rockets continue to show what they will be come April if Chris Paul can stay healthy—it’s anyone’s guess on how far the Thunder will fall by the time the playoffs start in mid April.

Keep this in mind, since the road loss in Boston on February 3rd, this Thunder team is a collective 1-5 on the road. I only write this because the next three games for the Thunder are at Portland, at the LA Clippers and then in Salt Lake City. All three of these teams linger behind the stalling Thunder and all three will be road games where the Thunder’s opponent has a great deal to play for as far as seeding position.

I had the Thunder at No. 4 on my Western Conference bracket sheet, but the reality looms Sam Presti’s team is in danger of falling to the No. 6 seed if they’re not careful.Paul George returned on Tuesday night against the Wolves, but it mattered little as the Thunder were virtually non-existent once again on the defensive end of the floor in giving up 71 first half points and 131 on the night. Allowing ‘only’ sixty points in the second half was the moral victory.

Karl Anthony-Townes destroyed the Thunder with a 41 point, 14 rebound night while Derek Rose made it appear the Thunder’s defense was running in quicksand. This wasn’t 2011 Derek Rose, but coupled with KAT he was enough of himself to make the Thunder look completely and utterly outclassed on the evening.

On the night, Westbrook and George took a combined 53 shots. As a pair they made 23 shots. As a team the Thunder took 94 shots…do the math.

You know, I sit here in Deer Creek, Oklahoma with my sleepy little obscure blog just doing my thing and following this NBA small market story. I don’t rant or rage anymore. I’ve settled into the reality of the situation in Oklahoma. The situation being, like as with education—these people seem fine was underachievement. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

The ownership group seems fine. The general manager seems fine. The players never seem overly urgent. The fans have never uttered a boo except for when the player who led them to the four Western Conference Finals comes rolling back to town with the Warriors. Then the fans boos like I’ve never heard fans boo in my like. It’s almost ugly.

It’s such an odd thing with the NBA in Oklahoma. It really is…almost like Mystery, Alaska for hoops. Yet, other than Jim Traber—no one seems to care on how much they spend and how little they have accomplished since Durant.

Very odd.

The Thunder in Portland on Thursday night in the late TNT game.

From The Dave Letterman Home Office in Deer Creek, Oklahoma

Top Ten Things More Interesting Than a Little Nick Gallo Bolt on the Daily Thunder

# 10 Setting a pile of leaves on fire.

# 9 Walking over random blades of grass.

# 8 Rolling over in bed.

# 7 Reading Brian Davis autobiography.

# 6 Wondering what it would be like to be marshmellow.

# 5 Watching Pauli snore.

# 4 Walking backwards over same random blades of grass.

# 3 Picking up a dirt clod and throwing it ten feet.

# 2 Reading the Op-Ed Page of the Daily Oklahoman

# 1 Picking any random stranger off the streets of Oklahoma City and asking them for their opinion on the Thunder.

Sam Anderson didn’t just come out and say it in his three individual epilogues in Boom Town, but this was pretty much the drift he left with the reader…namely, that despite at one time having Kevin Durant, James Harden and Russell Westbrook–the championship window in OKC officially closed with Kevin Durant’s departure to Oakland on July 4th, 2016.

I have to say I agree with him, but got a glimmer of hope when Paul George had his magical run in January and February. But the harsh reality has set in on the 5th day of March. This Thunder team isn’t championship magical.

But that’s the thing about sports…as in there’s nothing wrong with dreaming. But for those of us in OKC who know we stole Seattle’s team from Howard Schultz…maybe it’s time we exalt ‘our’ singular NBA championship banner from the ’78-79 Seattle Super Sonics who won the world championship in five games against Dick Motta’s Washington Bullets.

Are retroactive championship parades allowed?

I wonder if Sam Presti would smile at my sense of humor?

I was a college kid of twenty. Back then in Oklahoma City we didn’t even get all the Finals’ games live on our CBS affiliate. We would get the west coast games live, but would get the games in Washington on delay so as CBS wouldn’t interfere with their regular programming. That was the stature of the NBA back then on the major league sports ratings food chain. This was before David Stern turned the league into the most smartly marketed league in all of pro sports.

The Sixers were my team, but I always admired the way Lenny Wilkens worked his youngish Sonic teams in those two seasons when the Sonics and Bullets met in back to back Finals with each winning a ring.

I was an outlier in Oklahoma City. The NBA ratings weren’t all that great here. But I loved the NBA then and now as well. OU football and the Dallas Cowboys were the rage in Oklahoma City sports television sports ratings.

Wilkens was the coach. The top eight players were Gus Williams. Dennis ‘DJ’ Johnson, rookie Jack Sikma from Illinois Wesleyan, John Johnson, Fred Brown, Wally Walker, Lonnie Shelton and big boy Paul Silas. If I remember correctly, Wally Walker played on the championship team in Portland with Bill Walton.

This was a young team. Sikma a rookie, Williams in year three, DJ in his second NBA season, Downtown in year seven and tough John Johnson year eight. Interestingly…both Brown and Johnson played their college ball at Iowa.

The strength of the team was clearly the guard play with Williams and DJ emerging as the best backcourt in the game as the season wore on. This was a team which won on smarts and guile–the exact opposites of the Thunder teams of Brooks and Donovan. This Sonics team was a high, high basketball IQ team. Lenny Wilkins was not tolerant of stupid play.

There were twenty-two teams in the league. The Sonics ranked 19th in points per game scored at 106.6 while ranking 1st in points allowed at 103.9 per game. Defense won championships then and now.

The Sonics won the West by beating the Lakers in five and the Suns in seven to advance to the NBA Finals.

This is the call from Game 5 of our championship season in Oklahoma City.