WASHINGTON — For many reasons, it was not supposed to be this way.
In a season where the San Antonio Spurs nearly ran the table at home in the regular season, many presumed the road to a Western Conference Finals matchup with the Golden State Warriors was a foregone conclusion.
But nobody told the Oklahoma City Thunder, just as nobody appears to have told them that the Warriors were the best regular season team in NBA history. Golden State’s NBA Finals rematch with LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers may have made for the tidiest storyline, but if anybody didn’t understand before Sunday night that it was not preordained, they do now after the Thunder’s dominant 133-105 win gave them a 2-1 series lead.
In Game 3, the Warriors abandoned their aggressiveness from their blowout victory the game prior, settling for tentative jumpers instead of attacking the rim. Their misses led to transition breakouts the other way, Oklahoma City dominating the fast break battle that Golden State usually owns with an eye-popping 29-13 advantage. The Thunder’s 52-38 rebounding edge was more a function of the teams’ respective shot selection than anything else. Golden State didn’t take a free throw until more than halfway through the second quarter, and took only four shots from the charity stripe before halftime compared to Oklahoma City’s 25.
In the second half, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr refused to take strategic timeouts to help hemorrhage the bleeding. The game already spiraling out of hand, he left his starters in to absorb the damage in front of the delirious crowd. It was, no doubt, an effort to fire them up to be more motivated for Game 4, to come out with far more passion than they did Sunday night. But it also may have served as a reminder — there comes a point where there’s only so much a coach can do; where the blue and white stripes of raucous fans aren’t going to stop screaming; where Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook aren’t going to stop trying to jam your history-making storyline back down your throat.
Durant presents the single biggest issue for the Warriors in the league defensively, because they don’t really have anyone capable of keeping him in check. Over the past two regular seasons and the first three games of this series, Durant has averaged nearly 31 points and nine rebounds a game against the Warriors (that includes a contest in Oakland in which he poured in 30 in the first half before leaving with an injury). Harrison Barnes — who has drawn primary defensive duties on Durant so far — is undersized, but also lacks a quickness advantage to make up for it. Meanwhile, Durant’s ability to hit the three stretches a player like Draymond Green out of his comfort zone on the perimeter.
It might be time for the Warriors to make the adjustment they did in last year’s Finals — when they inserted Andre Iguodala into the starting lineup — to help shut down Durant. That would likely relegate Barnes to coming off the bench, but outside of a couple big outside shots, the North Carolina product has underwhelmed most of the postseason. Despite a postseason in which the Warriors have gone 9-4 thus far, Barnes has logged a negative plus/minus five times. His overall +59 is less than half of Golden State’s +109 total postseason point differential, despite logging over 31 minutes a game.
While they enjoyed a wire-to-wire regular season, the Warriors are no strangers to being down 2-1 in the playoffs. They faced this same scenario twice last postseason, against both the Memphis Grizzlies and Cleveland Cavaliers, needing a road win in Game 4 to avoid falling into a desperate 3-1 hole. They earned that win convincingly in each series and did so with their defense, holding the Grizzlies to 84 points and the Cavs to 82, each team’s worst offensive output of their entire respective postseasons.
But this Oklahoma City team is an offensive force when Durant and Westbrook are both at their peak. The Thunder haven’t been held under 92 points since the second game of the playoffs, and are second in overall scoring to the Warriors at almost 107 points per game.
Golden State dodged a bullet when Green was not suspended for Game 4 for catching Steven Adams in the groin with his leg after being fouled. Green was assessed a flagrant 1 foul at the time for excessive contact, later upgraded to a flagrant 2, but his intent was disputable (Thunder players thought it was intentional; Kerr and Green denied the charge). Regardless of which side of the debate you fall, it is unarguable that Green is instrumental to achieving the defensive effort the Warriors will require to level the series.
And with Green on the floor, along with Adams, fellow bruising big man Andrew Bogut, and primary Green accuser Westbrook, emotions should be running high right from the tip. As much as the Warriors are desperate to avoid having their backs against the wall, the Thunder can ill afford to watch this series become a best-of-three with Games 5 and 7 in Oakland.
If you watch one NBA game all year, make it this one. We’ll either see the best of the Warriors, compartmentalizing their humiliation and burning it as fuel to level the series and wrest back home court advantage, or we’ll know that we’ve already seen the best. The Thunder will emerge as the team we all knew they could be (say, when we picked them to win the NBA title), or they will watch the Warriors’ juggernaut, which hasn’t lost consecutive games all year, reignite and crush their dreams.
Either way, the fate of the NBA season may very well hinge on the result in Oklahoma City Tuesday night.
