After a humiliating Game 1, it's back to the drawing board for the Thunder
SAN ANTONIO — Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook sat on opposite ends of the Oklahoma City Thunder bench, Durant at the front and Westbrook on the end. Durant leaned forward, his face in his left hand, expressionless and mostly motionless. Westbrook stared forward at nothing in particular, elbows on his knees.
They watched, helplessly, the entire fourth quarter from the bench as the Thunder took a 124-92 Game 1 beating at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs.
What was going through their minds? What was Durant thinking, taking in a 32-point blowout in which he scored just 16 points on 6-of-15 shooting, his second-lowest scoring game of the season? What kind of emotion was his feeling after that? Anger? Embarrassment? Frustration? Disappointment?
“I’m not telling you,” Durant said.
“Because it’s over with,” he explained. “Move on. We just move past it and figure out what we have to do better. No crazy emotions. It’s not like we were upset and screaming at each other in the locker room after the game. That’s not going to make things better. We’ve just got to go out there and play better. So, no emotions.”
The way the Spurs blitzed the Thunder — virtually from the tipoff as Kawhi Leonard went uncontested to the rim for a dunk on the first possession — was startling. The Thunder looked unprepared and unfocused, with Westbrook saying they lacked intensity, energy and urgency. Those are the typical postgame crutches players tend to lean on when you get blown out by 32, but in this case, they seem to fit. The Thunder were rattled, and never responded. Durant noted that the game moved so fast it made it hard to react. The other thing that moved fast: the scoreboard, in the wrong direction.
The Thunder did their best to avoid invoking much of the “it’s only one game” jargon, but it is true: The Spurs don’t get to start Game 2 with a 32-point lead, even if they probably deserve to after the kind of performance they put in on Saturday. The Thunder had four days off to prepare for this Game 1, and now they have one to go back to the drawing board and sort out what went wrong.
“I don’t think watching from the sidelines — I’ll watch the tape tonight — I’m sitting there saying, ‘We can’t solve any of these things,'” Thunder coach Billy Donovan said. “Some of this stuff was self-induced on us, and I also want to give San Antonio a lot of credit because they made it very hard on us and played a great game.”
Here’s the scary part: Game 1 might’ve seemed like an outlier, an unusual playoff beatdown where one team snowballed momentum into a hefty blowout, but it really wasn’t that unique. The Thunder have never played well in San Antonio. They’ve beaten the Spurs once in six games at the AT&T Center in the postseason — Game 5 in 2012, when James Harden hit a dagger step-back 3 in the final minute. The average margin of those six losses: 25.1 points. The last four postseason trips? The closest game was a 17-point loss.
And that’s the harsh reality they face. If they’re somehow going to turn this series around and advance, they have to win at least once in this building, a fact the Thunder aren’t in denial about.
“They won one game on their home court,” Westbrook said. ” And now we’ve got to get ready and try and steal one here.”
Steal is an appropriate word, because it’s hard to imagine any other way the Thunder do it. They’ve proven over the 82-game schedule they aren’t disciplined enough to hang with the Spurs constant offensive churn. They lose their principles, they get mismatched in transition, and most concerning, they get lazy. The Spurs punish that kind of defensive insolence with their ruthless precision.
The Thunder’s shot lies in their stars. The reason some saw Oklahoma City as a legitimate threat to the 67-win Spurs, a team that was 40-1 at home this season, was because of the overwhelming excellence of Westbrook and Durant. Neither flashed much of that in Game 1 as they were left spectators to the Spur machine.
Durant wouldn’t divulge, so there’s a lot of mind-reading going on about how he felt following Game 1. If Durant, a free agent after the season, is forced to endure three more like that, he may have a whole other thing on his mind.
