Thunder Popped Again On The Playoff Road
By Randy Renner, Senior Writer
The Thunder continue a history of struggling when it comes to opening a playoff series on the road…after last night’s embarrassing 118-87 blowout in Houston the Thunder are now just 1-6 in playoff road openers.
Of course they’ve gone on to win their share of those series but had a couple guys named Durant and Ibaka to help rally the troops.
Neither of those guys is walking through the Thunder lockerroom door so Russell Westbrook will do what he can himself.
And remember this Thunder team is the youngest in the playoffs, even a couple of more veteran players, like Victor Oladipo, are playing their first playoff series.
“Just gotta communicate with those guys that have never been here before,” Westbrook said. “Myself, Nick (Collison), Dre (Roberson), Steven (Adams) those guys, we’ve all been in a lot of different series and it’s the first one to four. They’ve all won on their home court and regardless if you win by 20 or two or 40 it doesn’t matter, it’s still 1-0 and we’ve gotta come back and be ready to play the next one.”
Oladipo may have been showing his nerves, he managed just six points on 1-for-12 shooting overall and 0-for-6 on threes.
The Thunder at least have a couple of days to figure out some things. Game 2 won’t be played till Wednesday night.
Between now and then the Thunder have to do what they do best, better. Much better than they did against the Rockets.
During the regular season the Thunder led the NBA in rebounding and scoring in the paint but last night the Rockets dominated in both those categories.
Houston outrebounded OKC 56-41, 14 of the Rockets rebounds came off the offensive glass and with those second chances the Rockets were deadly, 12-14 shooting, scoring 31 second chance points compared to just four for the Thunder.
The Thunder defended well out on the perimeter limiting Houston to 33 shots from beyond the arc, seven less than their NBA-leading average of 40 and the Rockets hit just 30.3 percent of those shots. James Harden was just 3-for-11 from beyond the arc.
Trouble was the Thunder switching defense on the outside led to some mismatches and break-downs, opening up wide lanes for drives to the basket where the Rockets were deadly again, scoring 62 points on 31-for-45 shooting (68.9 percent).
The Thunder will live with what happens out on the perimeter but they cannot survive by giving up offensive rebounds and deep paint twos to Houston.
“I thought we did a pretty good job from behind the line on them,” head coach Billy Donovan told reporters. “But we gave up way too many second chance opportunities. That really hurt us.”
The Thunder faced much the same situation in the first half but managed to keep their heads above water by scoring 54 points. In the second half the OKC point production dwindled to 20 in the 3rd quarter and just 13 in the 4th “and they scored at probably their normal pace so that’s why it got so out of and for us.”
In fact the Rockets scored exactly as many points in the second half as they did in the first, 59.
So clearly the Thunder have some work to do and of course one game does not a series make.
But going back to the last regular season game these teams played there is a disturbing trend developing…rebounding and scoring in the paint have gone big the Rockets way in both those games.
If Donovan and his coaches can’t figure out a way to fix that, the Thunder will be hard pressed to win a game, much less the series.