The Oklahoma City Thunder have positioned themselves atop of the Western Conference, and are a perennial NBA title threat off the back of their Big 3: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka.
All three are supremely talented. Durant just been crowned his first MVP and is a four-time NBA scoring champion.
Westbrook is one of the most athletic players in the NBA, gets to the basket seemingly at will and is capable of putting up huge numbers.
Ibaka – as can be seen by the Thunder’s results in his injury-enforced absence – is the interior glue, a great low-post defender and shot blocker, and has a great mid-range jump shot.
This team has made three Conference Finals and an NBA Finals series and is still a young team with seemingly no ceiling, but is their sheer brilliance enough?
The fact that this team has been this good is astounding. Scott Brooks runs a simplistic offence, and that’s being rather generous.
The Thunder’s offence is essentially Hero Basketball. Durant or Westbrook get the ball at the top and isolate, beat their defender and throw up a usually fairly well defended shot and it goes in. The fact this offence has yielded such results just further proves how good Durant and Westbrook really are.
The 2014 Western Conference Finals have exposed this. Admittedly the Thunder are without Ibaka, who is one of the few players who can space the floor to allow the Thunder’s stars a bit more room to get to the rim.
The Spurs are playing the dynamic duo with single coverage and everyone else is packing into the paint, forcing Durant and Westbrook to be jump shooters. With no one on the team, other than Reggie Williams, able to be a consistent scoring threat from outside the paint, they can’t make the Spurs pay for clogging the paint.
Ibaka’s absence has had a dramatic effect on the Thunder’s defence as well, and the Spurs have been scoring inside at will. In an attempt to contain them Scott Brooks has been forced to play a line-up consisting of Kendrick Perkins or Steve Adams, Nick Collison and Thabo Sefolosha, which is their worst line-up in regards to floor spacing.
The Spurs led the Thunder 2-0 last time these two teams tangled, and the Thunder rattled off four straight wins to move to the 2011 NBA Finals. That team not only had a healthy Serge Ibaka, but it also had James Harden, making them much harder to defend.
The Thunder have the personnel to make the Spurs work for the series win without Ibaka, but they don’t have the coach. This team simply doesn’t do a good enough job of getting easy shots for its players. Westbrook and Durant are extremely talented but they are purely scorers, and don’t really make the players around them better.
While Durant and Westbrook are good enough to convert tough shots most of the time, the Thunder need an offence to get them some easy shots so they don’t have to compromise their defence in an attempt to slow down the Spurs’ relentless scoring.
The most efficient the Thunder looked in Game 2 was in the first quarter. They were running Durant off a high-post screen, where he was getting a bit of separation from his defender and hitting the mid-range jump shot.
Durant is good enough to hit that shot all the time and the offence isn’t that hard. It’ll be effective from the three-point line, and the Spurs aren’t likely to show a great deal for fear of compromising their stranglehold on the paint.
But after the first quarter the Thunder went back to their default settings and isolated at the top of the key. What’s worse is that the Thunder don’t even move off the ball. Whoever is isolated, the other just stands at the three-point line on the wing.
The offence becomes stagnated and with the majority of the Thunder’s line-up anchored to the paint in terms of producing offence, there aren’t a lot of options available.
Added to this, some of the shot selection of the Thunder,s superstars is appalling. It’s like they don’t believe their teammates can contribute either and throw up early contested shots as opposed to passing it around to find an easier shot.
Most of these shots tend to be contested jump shots which rebound long, which then make it easier for their opponents to get out on the break. In the playoffs, there aren’t a lot of teams that won’t punish on the fast break.
If Scott Brooks doesn’t change things up drastically it is hard to see this series progressing past five games. It would be another wasted season for the Thunder, who clearly only have championships in their sights.
Brooks is no longer the right coach for this team. He has shaped them into a championship-calibre team, but either through misdirection or inability hasn’t helped this team evolve into the machine it should be.
There is only so far Hero Ball and individual brilliance can take you. Without the right players to help spread the floor, teams can pack the paint against you and Hero ball becomes much harder. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, if you are struggling to get easy shots and your opponent is executing an offence to get them easy shots, things are going to go against you more often than not.
This team will be unstoppable if they can have an offensive structure to supplement Durant and Westbrook. We all know they are good enough to get their almost at will.
Imagine if they had a system to get easy shots for their other players? You can manage minutes easier because you don’t have to have them on the floor all the time to keep the offence flowing.
One thing is for sure – the Thunder need a new bag of tricks moving forward, because brilliance alone is proving to be not enough.
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