MIAMI — The Oklahoma City Thunder should have been angry.
It was Saturday night. They had just lost to the Miami Heat 122-120. It was a game that saw Shai Gilgeous-Alexander get called for a crucial offensive foul with 1:14 remaining (the NBA said a day later it wasn’t a foul), the Thunder waste a 12-point lead and referees missing a backcourt violation on Heat guard Norman Powell in the final seconds.
Their postgame reaction — the outward one, anyway — could be summed up thusly: Well, darn.
The defending NBA champions are winning far more often than they lose; a victory in Cleveland on Monday pushed Oklahoma City’s record to 36-8, the best in the league by a wide margin. The Thunder don’t get too riled up after wins, they don’t get too flustered after losses. They know what matters the most is what’s coming in April, May and June, and if they can find lessons along the way to sharpen their toolkits, that’s what matters.
“Going through the playoff runs, we’ve been on the scene now for a little bit of time, enough time to be exposed to it and I think the guys have kind of learned the nature of that through the playoffs, really,” coach Mark Daigneault said. “It’s a series, you win the game, and everybody on the outside is going to talk about how it was a foregone conclusion that you won and that you’re going to run away with the series. And then the minute you lose a game, it’s the opposite. I think when you’re exposed to that enough, you learn not to trust it.”
The Thunder started the season 24-1, then dropped four of their next six and six of their next 12. For a couple of weeks — gasp! — they looked vulnerable. They lost to San Antonio three times, including in the NBA Cup semifinals. Talk of “the Thunder could break the NBA wins record” became talk of “what’s wrong with the Thunder” almost overnight.
They’re 6-1 since, the one loss in Miami by exactly two points.
“To have those ‘problems…’” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said, clearly breaking out the sarcasm about OKC’s perceived slump. “Yeah, I think the biggest compliment you can give them — and the thing that just stuns me — is how they can sustain that kind of success and have that kind of success with a young roster. Usually, there’s some kind of agenda with young players. And that’s fine.”
The only agenda seems to be winning.
The Thunder are outscoring teams by 13.5 points per game this season, which is ahead of their NBA-record pace of 12.9 per game set last season. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — an All-Star starter, again — is the runaway favorite to repeat as the league’s MVP; sure, part of that is given the expectation that Denver’s Nikola Jokic may fall short of the league’s minimum-games requirement to be eligible for such awards, but Gilgeous-Alexander’s averages of nearly 32 points and just over six assists per game are certainly MVP-discussion worthy. They’re an NBA-best 20-2 at home and an NBA-best 16-5 on the road (the NBA Cup game was neutral site).
“We trust our process,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “We trust our development.”
It worked for them last year. Even with a “slump” this year, it’s working for them again. They’ve managed to be unfazed by the noise, whether it’s good or bad. They’re boring in that sense, in the best possible way.
“It’s not that you don’t hear it. We don’t block it out. We can’t block it out,” Daigneault said when asked about expectations. “It’s the nature of the questions you get asked. It’s in your face constantly. It’s more about, ‘Can you contextualize it and can you maintain perspective with it?’ And we’ve got a team kind of preconditioned to be pretty neutral.
“We try to maintain that environmentally around them with our approach and with the approach that they come in with every single day. But we’ve also got guys that have a pretty healthy emotional thing that doesn’t really go too high or low.”
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