Playing through adversity
The Thunder looks to drop those thirdquarter jitters.
Billy Donovan was concerned. He had every reason to be, even if the Thunder had just rocked the Eastern Conference champions for 76 firsthalf points.
The Cavaliers hit a cluster of third-quarter 3-pointers, and the Thunder could have wilted like it did during its early season string of blown leads.
Not this time. The Thunder puts its foot on the gas and blew past the Eastern Conference champs.
“I thought when they were going through that run of theirs, we did a good job of keeping that same pace and still playing the same way,” Paul George said after the Thunder’s 24-point win over Cleveland. “We played for one another and kept the ball moving.”
Saturday's holding off the Cavaliers wasn’t an isolated incident. If the Thunder has a doubledigit lead sliced, it's not losing the game like it did the first quarter of the season.
The Thunder has had a double-digit lead in 31 of its 46 games this season. Its record when it gets a lead of 10 points or more is 23-8. The last of those eight losses came in an embarrassing defeat in Mexico City to the Brooklyn Nets, who the Thunder faces Tuesday. The Thunder led by 16 in that game.
Since that Dec. 7 night, OKC is 13-0 when it gets a double-digit lead.
“When teams would
make their comeback, I thought we went into sort of a shock where we played uptight, we didn’t play as loose, and then we tried to will the game back on our own,” George said Saturday of the Thunder’s propensity to blow leads through the first 24 games of the season.
“I thought tonight we kept the pace going. As soon as they scored, it was a quick inbound, we’re coming right back down.”
Some of those games since early December have been no-doubters, like a pair of Lakers demolitions. Others have been integrity testers, like a triple-overtime win against the 76ers on the road in which the Thunder blew a 17-point advantage to win by two points. Three times since that loss to Brooklyn, the
Thunder has led by 16 points or more and won by fewer than three.
Other games have featured character-building rallies turned into runaways. On the second night of a back-to-back against a gritty Clippers squad, rather than panic when the first option wasn’t open, Russell Westbrook was patient.
Leading by 106-100 with under five minutes left, Westbrook waited for George to run cross court before driving right. When two defenders came to cut off Westbrook’s midrange jump shot, he recognized the imbalance and split them with a bounce pass. The pass looked like it was going out of bounds toward the baseline until George appeared for a reverse layup.
Like a quarterback leading his receiver, Westbrook trusted George to be in the spot. The Thunder traded blows with the Clippers, but eventually won by 10 in a dominant fourth quarter.
The NBA’s evolution to the 3-point line lends itself to seemingly insurmountable leads getting slashed in seconds. The 3-point line is being used more frequently every year, rising from an average of 22.6 percent of a team’s field goal attempts in the lockout-shortened season of 2011-12 to 33.5 percent this season, per basketball-reference.com.
So, when the Cavaliers hit four 3-pointers Saturday and the Thunder’s lead went from 24 to 12, Donovan wasn’t surprised. He knew the Cavs’ 2-of-16 first half from-deep wouldn’t hold.
More important was how would the Thunder respond.
“You saw how quickly that 20-point lead evaporated,” Donovan said. You’ve gotta be able to respond to runs like that. That’s gonna happen in the game. It was good to see our guys on two separate occasions in the first half and the second half respond when they started to make some shots and get on a run.
“With the way they shoot the basketball and get going, leads can evaporate pretty quickly, but I thought overall we gave the effort necessary to contest and challenge shots.”
When that run came, the Thunder didn’t change its play, but doubled down. OKC continued to push the pace on the league’s oldest team, resulting in a 10-2 response. It was coupled by the league’s No. 3 defense tightening up to keep Cleveland to two points on six possessions.
The lead stretched to 20 again, and the Thunder took another step away from an troublesome early-season issue.
“I thought we did a good job of playing through adversity,” Westbrook said. “Teams are gonna make runs each and every game, and your true colors show as a team and you find a way to stick together. I thought we did a good job of that tonight.”