Season full of adjustment starting to pay off for Oladipo
Right away, Victor Oladipo could tell this would be different.
In September, when he opened his first training camp with the Thunder after an offseason trade from Orlando, Oladipo sensed the change. In Oklahoma City, players were more dialed in. The support system was stronger.
It was a welcome change. But still a change.
Oladipo is playing the best basketball of his brief Oklahoma City tenure, helping spark the Thunder to four straight wins and averaging 21.5 points over that stretch.
To be great, he first had to integrate. That took time.
“It’s like when you get your first date,” Oladipo said Friday. “You get to know somebody. You get to know them and you start clicking after a while. We’re just clicking right now.”
It’s not that Oladipo had struggled through his first season with the Thunder. He’s the team’s second-leading scorer at 16.5 points per game and he’s shooting careerhigh percentages from the field (45.7) and the 3-point line (38.3).
But Oladipo didn’t settle in overnight.
His injury-riddled season hasn’t helped. He missed nine games in December with a sprained right wrist and six in late February and early March with back spasms. While he was out with the back injury, the Thunder traded for a pair of new rotation players, forwards Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott.
The adjustments, though, began long before that.
Before the Magic traded him, Oladipo had been part of the foundation in Orlando. The second pick in the 2013 NBA Draft had been a key
piece and developed an NBA identity before the Magic sent him to Oklahoma City as part of a trade for veteran former Thunder Serge Ibaka.
Suddenly, he was uprooted from the place he’d spent three seasons – from the coaches and teammates he’d come to know – and thrown into a new role on a new team.
And notably, that team featured Russell Westbrook.
Westbrook “makes the game a lot easier, obviously, for everybody,” Oladipo said. He also controls the ball more than any player in the NBA, and that was a significant change for Oladipo, who’d split his time in Orlando between point guard and shooting guard.
Last season, Oladipo scored 1.2 points per game in isolations, spending 7.3 percent of his possessions in those one-on-one situations. This year, he’s down to a half-point per game on 4.3 percent of his possessions in isolation.
By contrast, Westbrook isolates on 19.2 percent of his possessions and scores 5.2 points per game in those situations.
Oladipo puts the ball on the floor less this season. He shoots 6.6 times per game with no dribbles, up from 4.5 such attempts last season.
“I’m sure early on, first 10 games of the year, (Oladipo’s) probably saying, ‘I can do a lot more,’” Thunder coach Billy Donovan said. “But he also understood that they may have not been the best thing for our team at that particular time.”
Those changes in his game have come as a result of Oladipo’s openness.
He has been, Donovan said, “totally focused first and foremost on earning his way as a person,” on earning the respect of Thunder veterans like Steven Adams and Nick Collison and Westbrook.
“It’s different, obviously,” Oladipo said of playing alongside Westbrook. “It’s something you got to get used to, and I’m adjusted to it. I got used to it. Now we’re just playing off each other.”
The results, particularly recently, have been spectacular.
In five games since Oladipo returned from injury, he and Westbrook are averaging a combined 53 points, Oladipo is 16 for 22 from 3-point range and the Thunder is 4-1.
And finally those firstdate jitters are gone. Asked how he’d describe his relationship to the Thunder now, Oladipo said “Wife.”
“I’m in the straight honeymoon, relationship first-year, engaged in front of the crowd, got on one knee (stage),” Oladipo said. “We’re in the honeymoon stage, definitely.”