CAN THUNDER BOUNCE BACK?
Billy Donovan’s team will look to cut down on the turnovers and shooting woes that led to a Game 2 loss.
GAME 3: Thunder vs. Mavericks
6 p.m. Thursday in Dallas
Serge Ibaka drained a corner 3 and sidestepped down the court, his arms out, palms to the sky as the Chesapeake Energy Arena crowd went berserk. Dallas called timeout. The Thunder was ahead by seven and looked ready to finally run away with Game 2.
Then something happened: The Thunder didn’t.
In a two-minute, 36-second span in the fourth quarter, the Mavericks jumped back into the series through big shots, Thunder defensive lapses and OKC’s late-game offensive issues creeping up again.
The Thunder trailed 69-68 before Dion Waiters scored a layup and was
fouled, hitting his free throw to complete the 3-point play. Waiters’ play sparked Kevin Durant, who was 5 of 25 until an emphatic running dunk. Then, Russell Westbrook looked wild on a drive before regaining control and passing to Ibaka for his 3-pointer.
An 8-0 run in under a minute. The celebration didn’t last long.
After Ibaka’s 3-pointer kept the fans on their feet, the Mavericks scored on five consecutive possessions.
“Again, I thought we were really good defensively for the majority of the game,” Thunder coach Billy Donovan said. “… but if you look at the last 13 possessions they had the ball, they scored on eight of 13, which is not necessarily what they had done up to that point in time coming down the stretch.”
When the Mavericks called timeout at 6:44, the Thunder was 5 of 9 from the field and had committed just one turnover in the fourth. Offense wasn’t the issue.
Donovan pointed to a key Wesley Matthews layup at the 6:30 mark — the first points out of a Mavs’ timeout — that started the downslide. It was Matthews’ first bucket of the night, a baseline drive past Durant in which he absorbed contact by Enes Kanter at the rim and finished.
“We probably overhelped on Dirk (Nowitzki), we got pulled across a little bit and the ball got thrown into the middle of the floor,” Donovan said. “They rotated and Matthews got a drive out of the corner.”
The play boosted Matthews’ confidence. On the next possession, Waiters stopped his drive but Matthews hit a fall-away jumper.
“I do think the one shot — give Matthews credit on, I thought Dion played really good defense,” Donovan said. “He got to the elbow area, pivoted a couple of times, took a step back and he made it.
“But there were some other points where we were in the halfcourt we needed to do a better job.”
Before the halfcourt breakdowns, there was Nowitzki running unmolested down the lane, catching a pass on the break and dropping a bounce pass to Salah Mejri for a dunk to cut OKC’s lead to 78-75. Then, Westbrook went under a screen and gave Raymond Felton too much room to shoot. One-point game.
Westbrook was left trailing Felton on another screen which put the Mavericks ahead 79-78, and the comeback was complete.
In that stretch, the offense stalled. Durant and Westbrook took eight of the Thunder’s first 14 shots in the fourth quarter, going 2 for 8. The rest of the Thunder players who shot in that span — Waiters, Ibaka and Enes Kanter — went 4 of 6.
From Ibaka’s 3 at 6:47 to Felton’s go-ahead jumper at 4:18 — which gave Dallas its first lead since the start of the third quarter — the Thunder went 1 of 5. One miss was a blocked Kanter putback attempt. The other three were open shots, but each with 10 seconds or more on the shot clock.
Durant missed twice on hurried jump shots, Westbrook once on a 14-footer. Besides Durant and Westbrook, one other player (Steven Adams) touched the ball on those possessions before a shot went up.
The Thunder finished with a season-low 11 assists, Durant and Westbrook missing a combined 40 shots.
At Thunder practice on Tuesday, Durant, who had just two assists, took responsibility for the Game 2 slippage, saying he had to be better at making the right plays, putting his teammates in position to succeed.
“Just go ahead and put everything on me. I’ll take it,” Durant said.
Waiters didn’t attribute the Thunder’s breakdown to a one-man issue.
“It’s the playoffs. It’s a game of runs,” Waiters said why the Thunder lost the lead so quickly after seizing momentum. “They made their run. We made our run. They just made their run when it counted.”
As the Mavericks showed in less than three minutes, it doesn’t take long for a run to flip a series.