Carmelo opts to let Jerami Grant play
He’d had a hot start, and Carmelo Anthony had a chance to see what he could do at the finish.
But as the Thunder’s heated game with the Nuggets reached the final minutes of regulation, Anthony sat at the scorer’s table, watched Jerami Grant go to work and opted to head back to the bench.
Anthony returned for overtime of the Thunder’s 126-125 loss Friday at Chesapeake Energy Arena, but he could have been in sooner. He was at the scorer’s table when, with 2:22 to play in the fourth quarter, Grant’s 3-pointer put OKC in front 110-104.
When it did, Anthony shook his head and headed back to the bench.
“Sometimes — and I give our guys a lot of credit for this — when you’re subbing a guy in in a normal rotation and all of the sudden a guy gets going a little bit, a guy will say, ‘Let him go. Let him go,’” Thunder coach
Billy Donvoan said. “I think that’s what Carmelo did. Jerami made a 3 out of the corner, he was playing well, and (Anthony) said, ‘Let’s
let him keep going,’ and I respect that.”
Steven Adams made a similar decision at one point when Grant and Patrick Patterson were playing well together on Friday, Donovan said.
Anthony finished with 23 points on 9-of-21 shooting against the Nuggets, the team with which he started his NBA career. He had
12 of those points in the first quarter, hitting 5 of 8 shots. Anthony was 1 for 2 from the floor in overtime, hitting the only 3-pointer he attempted.
Grant had 16 points in the game, making 5 of 9 shots and 2 of 3 3-pointers. He played the entire fourth quarter, while Anthony didn’t play at all in the fourth.
Patterson’s impact
Patterson entered the game averaging 5.7 minutes and 1.6 points in the fourth quarter this season. He played 6:33 in the fourth on Friday and was at his best. He scored six fourth-quarter points, making 2 of 3 3-point field goals.
Patterson scored nine points in the game, making 3 of 7 shots and 3 of 5 from 3-point range.
But he made by far his biggest impact in the fourth quarter, when he locked in defensively as well as from behind the 3-point line.
Patterson, who struggled for much of the night when asked to guard Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, gave Jokic some struggles in the fourth, part of an Oklahoma City defensive effort that limited the Denver center to 1 for 5 shooting in the period.
In Patterson’s six-plus minutes in the fourth, the Thunder outscored the Nuggets by 16 points.
Presti hosts leadership summit
Thunder general manager Sam Presti hosted a leadership summit on Thursday, part of his seventh annual Forward Thinking Leadership Program. The summit brings together students from the three high schools involved in the Forward Thinking program, John Marshall, U.S. Grant and Centennial.
At the summit, which took place at the Thunder business offices, Presti spoke to students about the late Clara Luper, a schoolteacher best known for her role in the 1958 Oklahoma City sit-ins that helped overturn segregationist policies at downtown drugstore lunch counters. Afterward, students attended the Thunder-Nuggets game.
There are 60 sophomores and juniors in the program every year, and 420 students have completed it. Presti visits each of the three participating high schools twice a year.
Tip-ins
With the loss, the Thunder fell to the No. 6 spot in the Western Conference playoff chase . ... Rapper
Ty Dolla $ign attended Thursday’s game. He was scheduled to play a show Friday night at the Tower Theatre in Uptown.