Durant Keeping Quiet About Possible Thunder Changes

By Randy Renner, Senior Writer

Inquiring media minds want to know what changes the Thunder have in mind (if any) for tonight’s Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals against Golden State.

Reporters asked Kevin Durant about that during OKC’s shootaround today in the Bay Area.

“Um well we…” he started and then stopped, smiled and continued “I’m not telling you guys that.” He started laughing along with everyone else. “I was about to tell you all our...haha,” changes maybe?

Then Durant came back with a more standard and safe answer about what he and his teammates need to do tonight at Oracle Arena.

“We just gotta continue to play extremely hard and eliminate some of the mistakes we made. We turned the ball over too much. I had four turnovers in the first half. I can’t have that. So we gotta do a better job of taking care of the basketball and not giving them turnovers ‘cuz that’s where they thrive.”

Billy Donovan wouldn’t give away any state secrets either but as he said Monday night and repeated Tuesday at his team’s practice session “there are some things that we can do better, execution wise on both ends of the floor. We gotta play for 48 minutes and we gotta play better than we did the other night.”

The Warriors didn’t have shootaround, with the game tipping off at 6 o’clock local time (about an hour and a half earlier than a normal regular season game) preferring instead to meet at the arena to go over any last minute adjustments.

The Warriors haven’t lost two straight games anywhere this season, much less at home and with the series shifting to Oklahoma City for the next two games you figure GSW is probably treating tonight’s contest as a “must win” game.

Durant said that’s exactly how he and his teammates are looking at it.

“We feel the same way, that it’s a must win for us,” he said. “I mean we know we won Game 1 but that’s not the deciding game in the series and now we’re just trying to look at each game in front of us and worry about that one.”

The Thunder are now 3-5 in San Antonio and Oakland this season, including these playoffs. The rest of the NBA was a combined 3-83 in the AT&T Center and Oracle Arena. Only a tiny fraction of teams that have gone down 0-2 in a series have come back to win it.

So yeah this is a BIG game.

“We got a great opportunity on our hands,” Durant said. “We gotta take advantage of it.”

Tonight’s game tips off a little past 8 o’clock Oklahoma time and you can see it exclusively on TNT.

 

Randy RennerComment