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They need to put Mustafa in for Weaver!!

agreed completely with all your thoughts, Royce.. especially the refs’ calls.. i told my brother during the game, “I never complain about bad calls, but this is getting ridiculous.” especially at crunch time– the absurd call on Jeff Green that took away two points, the 50-50 on KD that gave them the ball, and the blatant goaltend that gave them two points.. in a tight game, calls like that make a big difference..

i’m with you that it’s not that huge a deal that we lost.. but knowing that we are a better team and were up by 19 and had to play the officials as well.. all that is hard to swallow.. i’m ready for Friday so i can get this out of my system..

Loss is Loss，complaining Ref is unuseful,but what makss me angry is fans of Bob think they dont get much help from Ref.
We need Harden in Offence,and give Sharkur some time.I really dont think Weaver can help anything

Thunder starting to miss Harden already.

Man…I missed the game tonight because I am a youth pastor and I miss the East Coast games because I am at church on Wednesdays. I am glad I missed it. I remember how bad the Suns game hurt…this would have made me want to pee on an electric fence while chewing thumbtacks and re-watching 50 First Dates.

I think this is a blessing in disguise… sorry but the team needs to work hard and play smart to keep winning… they’re good but they have a long way to go and this just shows it. I think the players and coaches will be frustrated and that should get their attention. Fact is, we fans quickly get lulled into projecting greatness when things go well but the reality is it takes a lot to develop into a top tier team and to compete every game in this league. This team has made tremendous progress but there is a long way to go.

The schedule is tough from here on in, not too many gimee games (and even those can sneak up and bite you). The Thunder are going to learn a lot in the next several weeks and it will be an emotional roller coaster for the fans… I am looking forward to a wild ride!

We need Mullens!!

@VCUOKCfan

Haven’t seen 50 First Dates but taking your last phrase in context I wont put it on my ‘must see list’

Boy, every time they play a game like this they learn a lesson and come back like hell the next game. The only trouble is they forget the lesson after about three weeks. geeeeeeeez.

MarcUpNorth :
I think this is a blessing in disguise… sorry but the team needs to work hard and play smart to keep winning… they’re good but they have a long way to go and this just shows it. I think the players and coaches will be frustrated and that should get their attention. Fact is, we fans quickly get lulled into projecting greatness when things go well but the reality is it takes a lot to develop into a top tier team and to compete every game in this league. This team has made tremendous progress but there is a long way to go.
The schedule is tough from here on in, not too many gimee games (and even those can sneak up and bite you). The Thunder are going to learn a lot in the next several weeks and it will be an emotional roller coaster for the fans… I am looking forward to a wild ride!

well said

Getting exposed is not a “blessing in disguise”.

bad news:Jazz will win
Good news:Spur lose

I’m not gonna lie, I am contemplating taking a bubble bath with a pugged in electrical appliance after what I witnessed tonight

I don’t care what anyone says, EVERY LAST ONE OF US that saw this game has that fear in our hearts bubbling now that once the playoffs come, our weaknesses are really gonna be exploited and we might just have a case of getting bounced quickly in the 1st round

@The Don

Yup I am glad I couldn’t get my pugged in elctrical appliances in through the bathroom door!

@ dream catcher

Thanks. By the way not only did Toronto beat Hotlanta tonight but the Pacers came within 5 points of upsetting the Cavs, on the road, playing without Granger… like I said there are no automatic wins in the NBA.

@ Eric4Mayor

Getting weaknesses exposed isn’t such a bad thing… with all the scouting that goes on (especially once the playoff prep starts) I think teams get to know your weakness pretty fast. Teams that do well figure out a way to adjust, compensate or minimize these. It’s not pleasant to have your team lose but it happens all the time, the Knicks beat Dallas a few days ago, it doesn’t mean that the Mavs will get bounced in the first round.

At least the Spurs lost.

Crappy finish, but was still a blast to be there. Serge saw my “IBAKA” sign and pointed up to me twice, which was pretty cool.

As far as the game goes, our weaknesses were most definitely shown for all to see. We lack an imposing big to prevent guys from driving the lane, our offense sucks without Harden and when KD is off, and we get way to sloppy when we get a lead, but this really wasn’t anything that we didn’t already know.

i bet shakur is activated next game, at least so he is available.

How many shots at the rim did KD have? It’s not that KD ‘missed shots he usually makes’, Charlotte was forcing him far away from the basket and KD was shooting jumpers most of the night. KD shooting 39% combined from outside 16 feet, which is good, but his bread and butter is getting to the rim and finishing / drawing fouls. Charlotte crowded him and he either gave up the ball on the perimeter or fought for long jumpers. When KD is catching the ball behind the 3pt line consistently, he’s not going to have a good game, especially against a team full of shot blockers.

Kudos to Charlotte for the defensive gameplan and adjustments. This highlights the big difference between KD, LeBron, Kobe, Wade etc. You double or hedge them far on the perimeter, they can break down a defense and find the open man. When KD gets the ball that far he’s either making a move (and a shot is going up) or he’s giving it up. He’s not playmaking.. hopefully that’s something that comes in time.

Defensive Breakdown

The Thunder defense probably played its best quarter of the season in the first quarter. Before the second quarter, the defensive score was +28. The final tally was +25. Westbrook had a horrible final three quarters. Thabo didn’t do much better. Both of those sad efforts negated a tremendous defensive game from Nenad Krstic, and very good games from Jeff Green and Nick Collison.

Defensive MVP – Nenad Krstic (+16)

He doesn’t jump four feet off the ground (more like four inches), but he is usually in correct defensive position. Check out his positives from the game

1st Quarter

• Contest Theo Ratliff (9:10)
• Contest Theo Ratliff (9:00)
• Contest Stephen Jackson (6:40)
• Contest Raymond Felton (5:40)
• Block – Theo Ratliff (4:10)

2nd Quarter

• Contest Gerald Henderson at rim (2:20)

3rd Quarter

• Loose ball steal (11:30)
• Contest Raymond Felton (10:00)
• Loose ball (10:00)
• Stuffed Stephen Jackson inside (5:40)
• Contest Tyrus Thomas (3:00)

4th Quarter

• Turned away Stephen Jackson at rim (2:30)

That’s pretty good production in thirty minutes of work.

Jeff Green (+8)

Nick Collison (+8)

Serge Ibaka (+2)

Eric Maynor (+1)

Kevin Durant (+1)

Kyle Weaver (zero)

Thabo Sefolosha (-5)

Thabo had many miscues on the night, but let’s look at the last one. With a little over a minute left – the Thunder is down eight. They need a stop here to have ANY hope. Thabo is on Raymond Felton. Tyrus Thomas (Krstic) comes over to set a pick. Thabo doesn’t go over the top – he actually goes to the side. There is a BIG opening for Felton. Thabo could have just fell down – it would have been just as effective. So now you have a quick point guard with all that room to operate versus a seven foot center. Felton simply pulls up and drains the jumper over Nenad. Game over.

Russell Westbrook (-6)

The Thunder was up 51-32 with two minutes left in the first half. Then the Bobcats went on an 11-0 run. Why? RW had three major mistakes in that time frame which led to seven of the points. I will breakdown two of the mistakes below.

Westbrook had been doing a little better in transition, but he’s regressed back to form. With thirty seconds left in the first half, guard Raymond Felton gets the ball in a transition after a Thunder miss. Westbrook is already in good defensive transition position near midcourt. Meanwhile Collison tips the ball away from Felton momentarily. This freezes Westbrook while other Bobcats keep running. The tip really didn’t cause a loose ball – it was a tip that buys time to get back. Russell pretty much stops and watches. The worse part is when Thabo was directing traffic by himself. Boris Diaw was one of those guys that raced away from Russell. Had RW kept going, Boris would have never had an opening near the basket. Thabo pointed for someone to get Diaw, but RW was hopelessly beaten. Thabo tried to contest it, but Diaw scored with a nifty reverse. Westbrook might as well been eating popcorn.

The last play of the half was even worse. There’s SIX seconds left on the clock. SIX SECONDS. You only have to play solid defense for SIX SECONDS. Westbrook picks up Felton fullcourt after the inbounds pass. Westbrook sees the pick behind him and elects to go behind – with four seconds left! Felton is now wide open and drains the three over Collison, who had attempted to close out. Going behind here serves NO purpose at all. It’s just lazy defense. Period.

this is a little off-topic, but why was espn showing the clippers/bucks game tonight? seriously? i mean, for real?

…i started to write a long rant about the nba and espn are constantly pissing on small-market teams, but we all know that’s just the way it is. meh.

…about HOW the nba…

@donuteyes
Cause the Bucks are playing good.

Not that i’m saying its good that the Thunder lost, they’ve shown the capacity to bounce back from games like this over the season (loss at Denver on the 3rd of March and then a 5 game tear)…they’ve only lost seven games in their last 25 in two months (jan-march 18) and at least two of those were one point affairs (san antonio and dallas)

that said, third quarter collapse is usually an orlando magic affliction…30-19 for a quarter isn’t pretty any way you cut it if you’re that 19. look for them to bounce back hard at toronto and indiana.

@justin
Definitely. We need to remember that we’re constantly whining about other teams saying they “had a bad shooting night” against the Thunder, when in reality, it is the Thunder’s defense that forced the bad shooting night. The same thing just happened to us. Sure, KD shot poorly, but it was because Charlotte is a good defensive team. It’s unfair to take that away from them, especially if we want people to recognize it against us.

Come back soon, James!

Missed Harden, needed another scorer really bad tonight, should have gave White a chance.

@Brandon

i’m glad you brought up the blatant goaltend. while i can’t really BLAME the officiating for the loss, those three calls, especially, really hurt us. and it’s more than just the six possible points. it’s a swing in momentum that the thunder got so tantalizing close to taking, but either a turnover or a bad call really kept that from happening.

but in reality, the end of the second quarter–it was like nails on a chalkboard.

@justin

@Lefty

0-7 from 3 is about as bad of a shooting night as you’ll see from KD. I give Charlotte credit for disrupting KD at the rim more than most and especially for their blocked shots on him, but when he has 7 quality looks from deep and all of them bounce out, it is what it is. An off night shooting the ball.

That being said, this certainly does highlight why the best in the game aren’t just scorers but also guys who initiate offense for others. The problem is that when your clear #2 option at scoring the ball is the guy who is supposed to be initiating the offense for others as well and you have no other go to scorer, then the ball movement within the offense stagnates, your offensive options dwindle (especially when you’re playing 4 on 5 offensively) and you blow a 19 point lead on the road.

If KD’s shot isn’t falling, then he absolutely needs to start using all of the attention he merits to get easy shots for others as the Thunder are not a potent offensive team to begin with.

I also have some issues with Brooks’ choices regarding rotation and substitutions but Larry Brown has always been an elite coach so you can’t be too hard on Brooks in his first year against one of the best basketball minds there is.

Shakur needs get some minutes next game if Weaver isn’t going to put up any points

I guess we had a big trade! From Yahoo:

“G Jose Calderon has returned as the team’s starting point guard, replacing Jarrett Jack, as the Raptors try to find a way to deal with lax transition defense, a glut of team turnovers and mounting losses. And Calderon, who started against Mike Bibby and the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday, gets Michael Westbrook and the Oklahoma City Thunder on Friday in Toronto’s next outing.”

I understand Russell is physically intimidating for other PGs. This might prove it.

Don’t know the code to shorten it but here…

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=AswNvpn.L1x8RCzM_8LLIlZBPaB4?slug=teamreports-2010-nba-tor

Stoops said Westbrook could be a cornerback, guess WR isn’t out of the mix either.

@J.G.

KD was flustered and his 3PT shot was off from the beginning, I think his second attempt was six inches wide right. Yet he continued to shoot them, often out of rhythm, because that’s where he was catching the ball and the Bobcats weren’t making it easy for him to get where he wanted to go. I think he was even intimidated a little by the physical defense on the interior after the first quarter.

When you see KD taking seven three pointers you know it’s a night where he isn’t getting the shots he wants and he’s just settling.

blaming the officiating is pointless. and a bit lame. Sure, had a few calls gone differently it *might* have changed the momentum (or might not). But that’s the way it goes. It most certainly is *NOT* what lost us the game last night.

The real issue here was the defense. Joe had a post a short while ago about the defense slipping and if it mattered. Yes, it matters. Last night was an example of why it matters. Our offense is not strong enough to carry us through on many nights. Some nights, such as the previous game against Utah, we can shoot 60% and win that way. But that is completely unreliable.

Sorry to say, but the lads have backed off from playing great defense and it came home to roost last night. We should have been able to pull a lock down in the second half and prevent Charlotte from shooting lights out like they did. But we just couldn’t.

Now I agree that having Harden out last night really hurt us. Had he been able to come in and knock down some treys and make a few other plays, that might have been just the extra boost to put this over into the win column. However, he was out, so that was that.

And in any event, trying to cover over defensive slip ups with extra offense is not a winning strategy for us. It may work in this or that game, but in the long term, it will fail and lead to losses like last night.

Brooks and company are going to have to get the guys to refocus on defensive principles — once again. It’s not that they defended badly, of late. Defense has been adequate. But it used to better than adequate. It used to be great. The team has backed off from playing great defense for the last several weeks. We’ve managed to get away with it, which in retrospect is probably a bad thing.

to condense my previous post…

Charlotte shot something like 72% in the third quarter. That is what lost us the game. Pure and simple. He we been able to play better defense and disrupt their shooting, this would not have happened and we would have won.

now, the good news:

we were in such a good position going into the game, the loss didn’t hurt us all that much. We’re still 16 games over .500, which is great. We were 5th in the West before the game and we’re still 5th in the West.

So, it could be a nice re-focus point for the team. A bit of a wake up call to let the guys know that relying on hot shooting is not smart. They’ve got to go back to the peas-and-spinach play of good, clamp down, smothering defense.

I didn’t get to watch the second half. That, apparently, was a blessing. Having watched the first half, I think what was exposed was our youth and inexperience. We’ve gotten used to no lapses in attention/focus but we saw one in this game. They got up 19 and plain and simple let off the gas/thought they had it won/lost focus. Just like that, the Bobcats had 11 points, all the mo and the feeling that they could win the game. That 1:43 stretch cost us the game. But for that, we would have survived bad calls, bad shooting, etc. So hopefully it’s lesson learned. This time of year and especially in the playoffs, you can never let up. Everyone is just too good. No lead is safe if you don’t play hard all game. Ask Chicago.

Just my $0.02.

SD

KD did one thing last night that really irritated me.

He went up, slammed a ferocious dunk, and then hung on the rim. A long time. At least two seconds, maybe three.

Ref should have blown the whistle on that one. I was embarrassed.

I can’t stand showboating players. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like LeBron. LeBron’s a great player, but the self congratulatory dancing after a good play… ugh.

Ok, Kevin didn’t do a dance. But that hanging on the rim was emblematic, to me anyway, of a kind of arrogant “yea, we bad” sort of attitude I was seeing from the players in the first half last night. Between plays they were giggling, doing little wiggle dances, high fivin. They were getting a little too confident that they were just going to steamroll over Charlotte.

Don’t get me wrong. I like to see the players happy. I don’t mind some swagger, if by swagger you mean a basic self confidence in their own abilities. But when it crosses over into arrogance, it’s not pretty.

And it bites you back too. They weren’t doing too much smiling in the second half. Payback is a b*tch.

Royce Young :
@crick
I don’t think that was a showboating thing at all. It was pretty clear to me that he hung on it because he had a guy under him and was waiting for space to clear to drop down. That’s why the refs didn’t whistle him for it.

could be, I’d have to go back and watch a replay.

I stand by the main point, though, which is that the team was acting way too cocky in the first half, as if they already had the game in their pocket.

@justin
Well this is clearly going to be a chicken or the egg discussion so it’s probably pointless.

But KD always catches the ball at about 18 ft out in this offense. I think I can count on one hand each game where he’s received the ball in in the post. So I’m sorry, but I don’t see how him catching the ball near the 3 PT line is going to take him out of his game since he’s pretty used to doing that for the majority of this season, and his entire career.

And you said it yourself that KD’s 3PT shot was off from the beginning (hence from the initial start, not after the Bobcats D had gotten to him). And a misfiring 3 point shot alone is typically enough to fluster a perimeter oriented player since that’s a key component to his arsenal AND it helps draw defenders out to him more, which in turn opens up his ability to head to the basket. Obviously I think the Bobcats defense played a part in limiting Durant’s good looks at the basket when he got closer to the rim, but to say he shot the ball out of rhythm all night is just wrong. At least 6-8 of his misses were on jumpshots where KD caught it, gauged what Graham/the defender would do while holding the ball at triple threat position with his feet set and properly oriented towards the basket. Only after all of this did KD rise up well over his defender and in his own rhythm…you know, like he always does. The only difference being that there was a clang instead of a swish.

The part of KD’s game that they disrupted was his ability to finish at the rim, the Bobcats certainly didn’t disrupt KD’s “rhythm” when he has time to catch the ball, set his feet, pause for a few seconds to feel out the situation and then get off a clean jumper. The blocks and contact in the paint undoubtedly affected his driving to the bucket, but the same can’t be said for his jumpshot from 18 ft on out.

But like I said, this is going to be a circular discussion where one can say A was the reason where the other will say B, neither one really knowing.

@J.G.

Kevin Durant showed zero inclination toward taking the ball to the rim after the first quarter last night. He was not in a rhythm at all offensively, when he got the ball on the perimeter he looked like he wanted to just shoot it every time. Durant is a good mid range shooter but he’s not great, he’s not Dirk for example who is hitting in the high 40′s from 16-23 feet. Durant’s around 36% this year from that distance. So even in a year where he’s dominating, those aren’t good shots from Durant.

Catching the ball behind the 3pt line makes Durant uncomfortable when teams are sending help when he makes a move toward the basket. That’s why he was shooting so many three pointers. He doesn’t have the ability to make plays for others in those situations so a good defensive team like Charlotte (or Dallas, who does this to him also) will just live with leaving someone open elsewhere. In a game where he was getting a lot of defensive attention, Durant only had one assist.

Taking 12 shot attempts (by my count) 16+ feet from the basket is not KD’s game. Even on his season’s average, he’s only making 3-4 of those shots. Against a good defensive team, maybe less.

He’s got to learn how to pass the ball at some point, and we have to develop a coherent game plan offensively to utilize our player’s skills to close out games. We were treated by, once again, a team like Charlotte who is playing team basketball on offense to close the game out and we’re not doing much of anything… there was a stretch in the fourth quarter with our second unit where all we were shooting were long twos for about 3-4 minutes.

Anyway that’s just my opinion.

Serge Ibaka’s over the top putback dunk was not in the top 10!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyOW9XfedY IBAKA!

@justin
Definitely agree that the first quarter was the last time he aggressively attacked the rim. But I guess I just don’t see Durant taking jumpshots in rhythm off of a clean pass and catch as him settling or getting completely out of his game (though, obviously, if his jumpshot is not falling he either still needs to attack the basket to get to the line or pass it away).

Your last paragraph pretty much summed how I feel in general though so I think we’re pretty much reaching the same conclusion, just disagreeing about one aspect of last night’s game.

And lastly, I think we all know who other defenses are going to happily leave open.