Every tight NBA playoff series comes to a point where a team has to put everything else aside and go with the five guys it thinks can get to the finish line. It’s the truest test of who and what a team believes.
That moment came with five minutes left in Game 6 of the Dallas-Oklahoma City Western Conference semifinal series. We had spent five games building it, but in an elimination game separated by just three points, the Thunder showed us what they believed in most: an attacking pairing of Jaylin Williams and Chet Holmgren that had seen just 92 minutes of regular-game usage. season.
Oklahoma City assembled that lineup, along with perimeter mainstays Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Lu Dort and Jalen Williams, from the 5:19 mark until a must-have possession with 27 seconds left, when Isaiah Joe replaced Jaylin Williams.
It didn’t work out well at all, as Oklahoma City was still crushed against the glass. This clip below shows PJ Washington easily throwing out Jaylin Williams to rebound a missed free throw (he almost dunked, for crying out loud) and setting up his own game-tying 3-pointer that will stay on fans’ lips. Thunder for a while. long time. It was one of six offensive rebounds Dallas received in the final eight minutes of its Game 6 victory.
More important, however, was what this lineup told us about the Thunder.
They had tried pretty seriously to prepare for this point in the regular season, experimenting with different lineups and coming up with different offensive strategies for when teams inevitably put their center on Josh Giddey and a smaller player in Holmgren. They talked pretty openly about how they expected teams to try this in the playoffs and were perhaps too confident in their ability to handle it. That said, his plan seemed to be working as Giddey repeatedly punished the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round for trying the same strategy.
However, once Giddey started hitting 3-pointers in the Dallas series, his leash became shorter than a Tom Thibodeau playoff rotation. The Thunder weren’t going to let him put up with this, especially if he was going to be a liability on defense as well; Giddey’s lack of confidence was evident in Game 3, and he only played 11 minutes in the final two games.
This is what makes it so difficult for a young team (and coach) to make the playoffs the first few times. They have ideas about what it might look like, but they don’t know it yet, and often they don’t know what they don’t know.
If the Thunder really thought a Williams-Holmgren frontcourt would be their saving grace, they probably would have spent more time on it during the season (although they did give him some running minutes in the Pelicans series). Instead, that alignment was a fit of desperation when Plans A through J proved wanting.
Let me emphasize that there is nothing wrong with that. Twenty-nine NBA teams end their seasons with some level of disappointment, and that’s true even for those that had largely successful campaigns.
In early October, anyone in Oklahoma City (fan, player, coach, whoever) would have gladly accepted “57 wins and a solid six-game exit in the second round of the playoffs” as a result of the 2023-24 season. . The Thunder were considered a year away from making the big jump, and their offseason moves (using their cap space to acquire even more Draft picks, rather than supplemental players) seemed to indicate they felt the same way internally.
Instead, they took first place in the Western Conference, had the second-best point differential in the NBA, and their best player finished second in MVP voting. Even in defeat, they were not humiliated: the final scoring tally in the six-game series against Dallas was 636-636, and a strong argument can be made that the league’s make-or-lose gods had a major influence on the outcome. .
Dallas screwed things up, but the Thunder were still able to play some beautiful basketball. Look at this sequence from the second quarter of Game 6, for example, where the threat of a Gilgeous-Alexander post-up is a lure for a Joe pop-out that leads to a Holmgren short throw and an instant, correct decision by find an open 3 for Cason Wallace. Frame this:
However, history will mark the Mavs series as a missed opportunity. The Thunder blew a 17-point lead in Game 6, got blown out on the boards by a player they traded on draft night, had some tactical moments in the middle of the series that they probably would like to recapture, and showed their youth at times. in a way they hadn’t in the regular season, like when Jalen Williams seemed to lose track of the clock late in the third quarter of Game 6.
Looking ahead, they now have the advantage of having much more information. Some questions they had were answered negatively (Giddey as a playoff player), others more positively (Gilgeous-Alexander as a playoff series star). Others get an incomplete (can they really win at higher levels by being so bad on the glass?).
The timing of all this is very interesting, because Oklahoma City has a tremendous opportunity in the short term. Yes, the Thunder are asking for patience and the team is quite young, but they also have an extraordinary cap situation, with a two-year window with Holmgren and Jalen Williams on rookie contracts.
That means the Thunder could sign another max-level player for two years with their cap space and still remain under the luxury tax. With their stock of future draft picks and some tradeable young players (Giddey, for all the hits he took against Dallas, would be a much more interesting player on other rosters than the Thunder’s), they worked out a deal. It won’t be the hard part. Identifying the right player is the challenge.
But I wonder, when the Thunder look at this team and this opportunity, how much they think about Game 2 of the 2012 NBA Finals in Oklahoma City.
GO DEEPER
After a disappointing second-round exit, what’s next for the Thunder?
The Thunder narrowly lost that game to the Miami Heat, 100-96, to even the series at one game apiece. Oh well, we thought, surely they’d be back, presumably a week later for Game 6. They had 23-year-old Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and 22-year-old James Harden and Serge Ibaka.
We still haven’t returned for an NBA Finals game. LeBron James happened, with some touches from Mike Miller in between, and the Heat won the final three games of that series in Miami. The Thunder traded Harden in 2012, and Westbrook was injured in the 2013 playoffs, then the Spurs circled around them in 2014. Durant broke his foot in 2015, and Game 6 Klay Thompson happened in 2016, then Durant That’s when it all ended.
The future is not assured, and while, on paper, Oklahoma City is as brilliant as any team in basketball, its current excellence depends largely on Gilgeous-Alexander being one of the league’s five best players at this moment. At some point, I might have to pass the torch to Williams and Holmgren, but we’re years away from that; Therefore, maximizing the human Slinky’s best moment is the challenge of the coming seasons.
The Thunder can attack this from a much more powerful place based on what they learned in the postseason. Yes, they had issues on the glass, but the most glaring need was for a secondary playmaker with size. I’m not sure that was totally evident until Dallas made it that way.
In that sense, you applaud the Gordon Hayward trade even if it didn’t work out: this was exactly the kind of big secondary connector with shooting ability that could have given them an advantage on playoff defenses, and target that ability instead of a five big men that would have stopped them was the right move. Unfortunately, Hayward’s one-man protest against shot clocks scuttled that idea, even though Oklahoma City gave it every chance (and more) to work.
In general, going from a good team to a great one is the most difficult step, but the Thunder have all the prerequisites ticked: they won 57 games, they have a key superstar and young players who should only get better, and the most enviable salary cap. and draft selection situation in the league.
Now, it’s about consolidating this new information (some of which they didn’t know until two weeks ago) and identifying which players best fit their three young diamonds.
Finding the right fifth starter is a big task – there aren’t many guys with 6-8 skills who are also rebounders and tradeable defenders sitting around waiting to be traded. But if the Thunder can pull off this final phase of team-building, we’ll be back in Oklahoma for an NBA Finals game, again and again and again.
(Oklahoma City Thunder photo above: Michael Reaves//Keynote USA/Getty Images)
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