The Oklahoma City Thunder loom as the scariest team in the playoffs, and it's not just because of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. Consider their critical road win over the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday, a victory that all but sealed the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference. Durant went just 8-or-26 from the field, and both Chris Paul and Blake Griffin had big games ... yet the Thunder still controlled the contest throughout before holding off a late Clippers rally to win.
Oklahoma City Thunder’s stifling defense wakes up at the right time
The Thunder’s defense has been off at times this year, but Wednesday’s victory over the Clippers showed what it’s capable of doing in a playoff series against a good offensive opponent.
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You can thank their defense for that. It woke up after a six-week midseason slump and made everything difficult for the league’s best offense against plus-.500 teams.
Missing players and lagging effort hampered Oklahoma City's D for much of March. The Thunder couldn't replace Thabo Sefolosha's length; both Perry Jones III and Andre Roberson were overwhelmed, and Caron Butler's defense is not a strength. They went small more often to limit the load on foul-prone Nick Collison and Steven Adams while Kendrick Perkins was injured, which often helped their offense, but hacked away at their defensive identity. Westbrook's explosiveness looked as normal as ever, but his lateral quickness was off after returning from his third knee surgery. Even Durant's off-ball defense fell off without the Sefolosha safety blanket around.
When this team is on, though, it has too much length for the best offenses to overcome. It can aggressively trap the ball-handler on pick-and-rolls and rely on its remaining three defenders to cover the other four offensive players. It uses the combination of Serge Ibaka’s timing and Perkins’ wide body to seal off the paint. Open threes are often yielded, but it’s such a chore to move the ball that shooters end up out of rhythm.
This was the Clippers’ problem for most of the game. Whenever the Thunder were able to set up their half-court defense, the Clippers could not get anything around the basket. Most of Griffin’s 30 points, for example, came on the break. When the game slowed down, we saw a lot of this.
Oklahoma City’s size was too big an advantage. The Thunder outscored the Clippers by 22 points when two traditional bigs shared the floor and were outscored by 16 points when they went small. It’s the biggest reason the Clippers hit just 50 percent of their shots in the paint.
And that size doesn’t just apply to the bigs. It also applies to the perimeter players, who used their length to bother passing lanes and step down to provide even more paint help. Oklahoma City’s rotations were crisp, leading to situations like this when the Clippers couldn’t even get the ball to the rim.
With all that activity, the Thunder forced the Clippers to be one-dimensional. Aggressive hard hedges combined with great rotations in the back led to steals and many out-of-rhythm possessions. Passes were consistently a beat off. This trap, for example, forced Paul to throw a pass behind Griffin, messing up the timing of the entire play.
Here, Durant sank down on an aggressive rotation on Griffin, forcing Paul to attempt a lob pass to Durant’s man on the opposite wing that had no chance.
There were times when the Clippers had some success against Oklahoma City’s defense. Going small at the end of the first half opened the floor and led to a mini-run. OKC’s own small lineup combined with poor offensive possessions also allowed the Clippers to get into secondary transition situations during their fourth-quarter comeback.
On the whole, though, the Thunder enforced their will on the game with their size and length. To some degree, this goes against what many believe the Thunder should be doing with their rotations. All those calls for Oklahoma City to commit to small-ball have some merit; a tiny lineup featuring Westbrook, Durant, Ibaka, Reggie Jackson and Derek Fisher has blown teams out when on the court this season.
At the same time, Oklahoma City will have a size and length advantage against any top contender it faces. We know the Spurs and Rockets have trouble dealing with these elements: Oklahoma City is 7-1 against those teams this season. Wednesday's game showed that the Clippers may have trouble in a potential second-round series as well.
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All this said, a familiar problem did creep up for the Thunder: pitiful late-game offensive execution. A couple of big shots bailed them out; otherwise, this would be the story of the game.
Pace remains the biggest problem here. Once Oklahoma City took a double-digit lead, it stopped trying to attack. Westbrook too often walked the ball up the floor and waited to get the Thunder into their set until the shot clock was down. Four examples:
Criticisms of Oklahoma City’s late-game execution often misappropriate blame. It is true that the Thunder still don’t have a lot of late-game sets with multiple options, but the bigger problem is that they don’t give themselves a chance to let those secondary options develop. There was way too much time left for Westbrook to start thinking about killing clock. In tight situations, the Thunder need as many of the 24 seconds as they can get.
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