How the Thunder experimented all season to find winning formula
It had a perfect prize fight billing.
The Splash Brothers versus the Stache Brothers.
It was going to be the Golden State Warriors‘ beaming radioactive lightshow against the Oklahoma City Thunder‘s physical ground and pound.
The Thunder had just taken out the 67-win Spurs leaning heavily on a super-big lineup of Steven Adams and Enes Kanter. They were walking into a series against a whole new beast, the 73-win Warriors, who feature the famed “Death Lineup,” a grouping that is centerless and whose tallest player is 6-foot-7.
Big against small. Size against speed.
Until Billy Donovan turned that, and the series, on its head in Game 3. With 7:18 left in the first quarter, guard Dion Waiters headed for the scorers table to check in. Everyone in the building assumed Waiters was subbing for Andre Roberson, OKC’s offensively limited shooting guard whom the Warriors had resolved not to guard. Instead, Waiters checked in for Adams. The Thunder didn’t fear death; instead, they stared it in the face. And it has worked. The Thunder’s small lineup has outscored the Warriors 91-35 in 26 minutes over the past two games.
But the process of Donovan arriving at his small-ball lineup has been a long, often uncomfortable road. There were some grumbles in the locker room at times about his choices, mostly about closing lineups. He used the Kanter-Adams combo on opening night against the Spurs, and then didn’t go back to it for almost three months. He played small-ball early in the season, but stopped doing it around the All-Star break.
He said this after a loss in February to the Warriors: “But like for example, Golden State, they went small against us and I didn’t want to go small. I wanted to try and stay big to see what that looked like in playing in that game.”
The Thunder wanted to win that game, and every other game in the regular season. But Donovan wasn’t shaken by the anxiety of losing, instead viewing the 82 games as a lab for experimentation.
He’s a naturally curious coach, a learner who is always searching for information. Thunder general manager Sam Presti praised Donovan’s “tactical competence” when he hired his coach. Donovan takes notes on other coaches, asks questions and attended NBA training camps while he was at Florida. He was known as an “analytics guy” at Florida, but resists the idea he lets the numbers dictate decisions on their own. He wants the whole picture.
“I look at all the numbers, I look at all those things,” Donovan said. “But I think it’s very easy a lot of times to point to numbers and throw things out and make an argument why something is good and/or bad. But a lot of times you have to go back and watch film to really understand it.”
An example of that: Donovan tried small ball against the Spurs in Games 2 and 3. It was a failure, both in the stat sheet and on the tape. So he pulled the plug. He tried his newfound anti-death lineup in Game 1 against the Warriors, and it wasn’t very good, so he didn’t use it in Game 2. But he closely studied the reasons why it didn’t work, and wasn’t afraid to go back to it.
“Sometimes those decisions you make and trying to do some of those things doesn’t work out well,” he said. “You know, a lot of times, I think because of all the analytics, people can look at lineups and matchups. It’s very similar to the Enes [Kanter] and Steven [Adams] situation in San Antonio.
“Sometimes because the numbers don’t bear out, you’ve got to watch the film to figure out why it didn’t work out. I wanted to have that at least as an opportunity to do that substitution-wise, and we did it, and that group played well. So we stuck with it for a while because they were doing a good job out there. If it didn’t work well, we probably would have had to make another adjustment and come with a different lineup.”
Donovan has tried more than 250 lineup combinations this season. This postseason he has tried 104. (By comparison, the Cavs have used 81. The Warriors are at 136, but they also played six games without Stephen Curry, which skews it.) He has mixed. He has matched. His small-ball group that’s destroying the Warriors played only 46 minutes together all season. It was a minus-31.
As a rookie coach, Donovan knew he had a roster full of talent and versatility, but he had to do two things throughout the regular season: (1) learn his players and (2) build trust with them. Even if Kevin Durant says it was the other way around. Donovan did that by integrally keeping players involved in the rotation, making sure he was engaging all 15 players. He routinely spends time with players after practices, standing smack dab in the middle of the practice floor talking over assignments and roles.
It has been a season of discovery for Donovan. He entered training camp with an open mind. He has echoed the same message the front office was trumpeting way back in October: Don’t obsess about what it looks like now; think about what it can look like later. Presti didn’t construct a roster to play one way. Or even two ways.
As one team executive said, if you identify the trend and try to copy it, you’re already too late. It’s about defining your own trend. The Thunder were rigid in their roster building. Presti has always put a priority on size at each position, athleticism and positional versatility. The “trend” the Thunder are creating is having an elastic roster that can bend in whatever way is required. But what that takes is a high-minded coach, one who can identify adjustments and enact them on the fly. Donovan was taking over a talented, but complex roster. He had 82 games to figure it out. And he used every single one of them to do it.
