On Tuesday, the Oklahoma City Thunder performed what was concurrently going to be arguably their most necessary sport of their season to this point and what ought to have been one in every of their best. At 37-38, the Thunder had an opportunity to succeed in .500 and successfully take a two-game lead over the Dallas Mavericks for the No. 10 seed within the Western Conference with their tiebreaker factored in. All they wanted to do was beat the lowly Charlotte Hornets at residence, and to make issues even simpler, these Hornets had been with out 4 of their finest gamers: LaMelo Ball, Gordon Hayward, Terry Rozier and Mark Williams.
Yet when the ultimate buzzer rang, the Hornets had defeated the Thunder, 137-134, and whereas their defeat might be attributed to any variety of components, there have been definitely a couple of self-inflicted wounds that made the loss sting that a lot worse. All-Star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander missed the sport on account of an ankle damage he has largely been capable of play via, and whereas it was not said immediately, that seemingly needed to do with the truth that this was the primary sport of a back-to-back.
Gilgeous-Alexander has largely been held out of at the very least one sport in back-to-backs just lately apart from a Los Angeles double-header during which he performed simply 26 minutes within the first installment. Additionally, the Thunder used a 12-man rotation, successfully permitting third-stringers to determine the sport in a vital stretch early within the fourth quarter.
The Thunder nonetheless have six video games left on the schedule, and their play-in hopes are definitely nonetheless alive. But they took an pointless hit on Tuesday, and followers hoping to see their workforce attain the postseason weren’t thrilled about it. Thunder coach Mark Daigneault stood agency after the sport, nonetheless. He’d prefer to make the play-in, however he’s not going to compromise his workforce’s long-term imaginative and prescient to get there.
“I believe whether it is an end result that’s downstream of our course of and the best way that we’re making an attempt to do issues it might be nice as a result of it might simply be sort of a marker alongside the best way, however it’s not so necessary that it is gonna distract us from our method of doing issues,” Daigneault stated of the play-in match. “We must wager on that, day over day over day, we have finished that for 2 or three years. That’s what’s put us able to compete for the play-in, so for us to desert that at this level could be hasty, and fairly frankly, we have to double-down on this mentality previous this season. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
This is loads of jargon (and we would count on no much less from the workforce that invented the place of “Director of Insight and Foresight”), however what it primarily boils right down to is that this: the Thunder usually are not going to alter the best way they function for the sake of a play-in berth. They are going to proceed to make use of deep rotations. They are going to take a seat Gilgeous-Alexander once they consider they should (although the Thunder are, happily, out of back-to-backs). This continues to be a workforce fixated on course of even when it comes on the expense of outcomes.
That’s not an unreasonable place. After all, it is pretty unlikely {that a} No. 10 seed results in any type of severe postseason run. But it is uncommon in a league that sometimes prioritizes postseason appearances when doable. As good as a better draft decide and a bit of additional expertise for the deep bench gamers could be, the expertise even a single play-in sport can grant tends to be helpful. The Thunder have not performed a high-stakes sport in years. If Tuesday was any indication, they don’t seem to be in any rush to alter that.
