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Daequan Cook has been on my mind lately. Today is the day that NBA teams get to actually, you know, speak to their players. And the only real free agent business we have left is Daequan Cook and the Russell Westbrook extension.
Daequan was tendered a Qualifying Offer by the Thunder on June 27 for about $3.1 Million for the upcoming season. What this means is that Daequan was a first round pick who has completed his fourth season, and received the QO from his existing team thereby rendering him a restricted free agent (if the Thunder wouldn’t have offered the QO Cook would be an unrestricted free agent). This means that the Thunder expect to bring him back for the $3.1 and have the first right of refusal should some other team offer him a higher contract offer that he signs. The $3.1 Million figure is 125% of last year’s salary and is part of the old CBA. It’s certainly possible that Daequan could receive a higher offer from a team, but I really don’t see that happening. It’s also possible that Daequan’s representative could negotiate a different amount or length of a deal independent of the QO, but I also don’t think that’s likely.
So we are likely to see Daequan running to the corner waiting for the pass to hoist up a three quite a few times this season. Read more…
Commentary
With the great American tradition of Thanksgiving just a few days behind us, and the excitement of actually having an NBA season to look forward to, I quickly put together a quick list of Thunder related things I am thankful for.
1) Obviously NBA basketball.
2) That Kevin Durant, and to a lesser degree James Harden didn’t get hurt. KD probably played more rec league/charity games this summer and fall than any other NBAer, and Harden was also there a lot too. I know that most other players were in the gym working out and working on their games, but these two Thunderers were constantly in competitive situations all over the country. Heck, I’m glad that no Thunder players got hurt.
3) That Perk is back. He was a three legged horse in the Playoffs last year, but even as it was, our defense improved with Perk and Ibaka in the paint (and Green and Krstic gone). Read more…
Commentary
It’s definitely the slowest NBA news period since…well the last NBA lockout. There is just very little noteworthy going on. I’ve begun to realize how much of my online time is devoted to the NBA–probably a way too unhealthy amount. But still, even in these quiet NBA news cycles, old basketball junkies like myself still click away on sites like Basketball Reference.com or Hoopdata hoping something catches my interest. Yesterday I was reading about former Sonic Detlef Schrempf’s chances on making the hall of fame (not strong); and that got me thinking about whether or not Gary Payton was yet eligible for the Hall (I think he has to wait one more year), and that led me to look at GP’s awesome career stats and how those were lining up with our new young All-Star Point guard Russell Westbrook. I’m like that. I just get going and rabbit trail hours away looking at how one player’s stats compare to another. I know, I need a new hobby.
Then I was looking at Twitter and saw that James Harden was getting ready to throw down in that game in the Philippines today. It made me think about how far he’s come in the two seasons he’s been in the league. He’s really being considered as one of the young up and comers in the league. All of the playoff exposure has sort of put him on the map as compared to other good young players at the same point in their careers who haven’t as yet sniffed the playoffs (Stephen Curry, Tyreke, DeRozan…etc). Read more…
Commentary
It’s great to see James Harden exploding onto the national scene and coming out from under the shadow of the bigger names playing ball in OKC. First it was Durant making a huge otherworldly jump in production in his second season, then Westbrook last season answered most questions about whether he was a “real” point guard. We are seeing great things from Serge Ibaka, but it’s big game James that is really putting it all together now.
Since Jeff Green was traded the minutes have opened up for James and he has responded. So far for the month of March (7 games) James is rolling with 31 mpg, 51.2% FG, 35.3 % 3fg, 93.8% FT, 3 rebs, 3 assists, almost 2 steals and 18.3 points per game. It’s incredible production and I for one am not surprised.
Read more…
Other
You might have noticed in the game against the Knicks on Saturday that the Thunder were playing from behind most of the game and really only pushed through at the end of the game with some alternate lineups. Quite a few teams in the NBA feel that their Starters are their best players (or at least the best mix of players) and so while they eventually have to sub them out for rest during games, they usually come back to them in crunch time. Not so with the Thunder as evidenced by the Knicks game and many others. Royce made note of it in his post game wrap:
Scott Brooks talked after the game about adjustments and probably the biggest and most important one he made was going with one of the Thunder’s best lineups down the home stretch. He had Westbrook, Harden, Durant, Ibaka and Collison on the floor to defend New York’s pick-and-roll game. It worked well, forcing the Knicks into long jumpers and also meant that the Thunder crushed the glass.
True words. That particular lineup has long been one of my favorites going back to last season, but the question in my mind is if it is so effective (and it is as I will show) why aren’t we seeing more of it? Read more…
Commentary
Note: Long post warning.
I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time and I just can’t do it in a brief manner, so there will be a lot of words–sorry for that. I thought maybe Royce or J.G. or one of the other guys might tackle this before now but it is still quietly in the background. So here goes:
October 31st is just around the corner and by the end of that day a significant decision will have been made by Sam Presti and the Thunder. The decision will be whether, and at what value to extend Jeff Green’s rookie contract. I’m oversimplifying a bit because it takes both parties to agree to a contract-one to offer and one to accept, but regardless, if Jeff Green doesn’t re-sign before midnight on Halloween he will enter the season as a player with an expiring contract and restricted free agent at the end.
As you likely know Kevin Durant and Green were both taken in the 2007 draft, Kevin at #2 and Green at #5 by the Celtics. Presti pulled off a draft day deal which brought Green to Seattle (along with some other pieces) for Ray Allen. That was three seasons ago and per the current and soon to expire Collective Bargaining Agreement players who have completed three seasons are eligible for contract extensions. Kevin was offered and signed a maximum contract for 5yrs/$86 million or so. Green on the other hand has not signed an extension as far as anyone knows. His representatives may very well be in negotiations (and likely have at least had some discussions), but nothing is in ink as of yet.
There are a lot of issues here. Read more…
Commentary
Happy father’s day to all.
In doing my usual perusal of the web for anything Thunder related or interesting about basketball in general I came across this little piece over at Wages of Wins-Dave Berri’s blog.
I usually read WOW whenever they have something new up, and lately Berri has been featuring guest writers on the blog who subscribe to the whole “Wins Produced” model of player and team evaluation. You can take that for what it’s worth. As far as I’m concerned Wins Produced and Win Score (Wins Produced’s little brother) are as good as any other one number metric out there for evaluation of performance, but I’m not convinced you can boil any player down to just “one number” and say “player A is better than player B because this metric scores him better”. At least no “one number” metric yet has convinced me of such.
Anyway, today’s article over at WOW is about the Thunder and the rise from cellar dweller to 50 wins in just one season. It is written by James Brocato who is listed as a passionate supporter of the Supersonics, yet I didn’t really sense any sour grapes or anything. But what did stand out to me is the complete absence of any reference to the improved team defense. In fact, the word defense is nowhere to be found in the entire article-I checked twice.
I haven’t posted anything in a while and I thought this might be a decent read for a quiet-no basketball Sunday, so enjoy a fair article about the Thunder and discuss!
Other
After game 1 I spent some time looking at line ups and how they performed against the Lakers in the regular season and after the playoff game in L.A. What I determined was that there three lineups used in game 1 that had success and should be considered for extra minutes in games going forward.
The lineups had some commonality as you would expect: all three of the best lineups featured Kevin Durant. But all three also featured Nick Collison as well. Mr Blood and Guts always brings his lunch pail. Also two of the three best lineups feature Serge Ibaka, and only one of the three best feature Jeff Green, and none feature Krstic. You probably see where I am going with this.
Whether or not Brooks looks at +/- numbers or gets fed info about player pairs is something we may never know but either way Brooks made a huge paradigm shift in game three (which I find very appropriate given it was the day he received the Coach of the Year award) which might have been his Gold Star coaching moment of the season. He changed up the lineups and went with the +/- warriors for a big chunk of the third and all the way down the stretch until the final moment when he substituted offense/defense to close out. He really hasn’t done this before to my knowledge and those of us that are fans of statistics and player pairs probably were overjoyed-doubly overjoyed of course because it worked and was a huge game changer. Read more…
Other
Okay by now I’m sure everyone has read all the stories about how the Thunder are likely dog meat the rest of the series and how Ron Artest dominated the match up with the scoring champ and how the Thunder looked intimidated in the first quarter. I’ve read them, you’ve read them, I’m over it. We played the defending champs and nobody thought we would sweep them I don’t think, so a loss in game one is just a loss and we have at least three more games to turn this into a serious series.
Since we all watched the game we all know what didn’t work (Kevin Durant’s jumper, Green’s jumper, Thabo’s jumper—hmm there seems to be a theme here), but I thought I would look at it from the other direction and see just exactly DID work in that game, what has worked well during the regular season, and what we could hope to see more of in game two and beyond.
I’m not talking X’s and O’s here, but lineups. Lineups that give us favorable match ups and a better chance to win. We have 82 games of historical data that we can mine to see just where our strengths and weaknesses lie.
In yesterday’s game Coach Brooks used 9 different lineups worth mentioning (a few more actually, but they were for less than a minute and don’t serve our purpose here); a few of them he used more than once, starting with the starters, which I will call lineup A.
Lineup A: RW, TS, KD, JG, NK. This lineup got three stints, the first was in the first quarter for a bit more than 8 minutes where it was -4. Next it showed up in the middle of the second quarter for about 3.5 minutes and was +3 and included a 5-0 run. Finally it was back in to start the second half where it was -3 in 6.5 minutes. The total was 18 minutes, -4 , which works out to -15 points per 100 possessions. Not so good. Read more…
Commentary
I found this post on the blog called Red’s Army, and I thought it was interesting enough to repost. Especially in line with Royce’s earlier post about Garnett’s post game comments, and his subsequent fine for said comments. The picture to the left is the first of a few more in an article called ” A referee’s guide to calling an Oklahoma City game“.
Click on over and enjoy some humor from the Boston perspective. I think it’s funny and creative even if it’s obviously intended to make a slanted point.
My take on the whole thing about Boston feeling like the Thunder got “all the calls” is that it is a little hypocritical. For me, from a fan’s perspective of many years, it seems that Boston, the Lakers and Cleveland complain about calls (all the while doing everything under the sun to draw calls) more than the other 27 teams combined.
But I digress. Enjoy a little Saturday humor.
Other
All things being equal I think more defense is better than less defense in the NBA. Or put differently I think that playing more stout defense is better for your team goals than flimsy defense.
So far this season as we all know the Thunder have hung their hat on terrific defense and sort of average or middling offense. It’s been a good formula; turning a 23 win team into a 41 win team (thus GUARANTEEING a winning season) with 17 games to go. How cool is that?
But if you’ve been paying attention you’ve probably noticed that the defense has been slipping a bit lately. The team certainly still has a defensive mentality, and a defensive identity, but lately we haven’t seen the team get out and just stuff the opponent for 48 minutes. Instead what we’ve seen is the Thunder playing sort of “situational” defense, where for example in the New Jersey game the team played just good enough defense to keep them down 10 or so until a couple of big threes had them threatening. The Thunder then tightened up the defense for a couple of possessions to seal the win. Rather than play all out D every possession I think we are seeing the team play say 75% of it’s defensive intensity for a lot of the game and then really getting after it when the situation gets tense or out of a timeout when the Coach is imploring them to tighten it up. We’ve seen that a number of times lately. Read more…
Commentary
So what do you do when you are home sick on the couch nestled by the fireplace on a spectacularly beautiful Pacific Northwest Saturday morning? I guess if you’re like me (and hopefully your not—sick that is) you start churning through hoop stats and see what shakes loose.
I thought I would look at where our newest All-Star rates among his peers in various statistical categories. Now that KD is having the kind of season that we all knew he was capable of, his true “peers” have become a very elite and small group of ballers. For this article I wanted to truly narrow down who I compared him with to give a really fair snapshot of Kevin Durant’s greatness on the court. It makes no sense to compare him with Dwight Howard, who indeed is a peer, but has a totally different kind of game. Likewise to compare KD to Steve Nash also would be superfluous. No, I want to compare KD to the guys who’s game is somewhat similar to his. I am looking for guys who are wings, yet have that sort of inside/outside game. Guys that bomb away, yet get into the paint. Guys that will do a little bit of everything well, and are either THE LEADER on their team or at least nearly so.
So my criteria is that above, but also that they a) have appeared in 40 games or more b) play nightly minutes of 32 minutes or more c) have a PER of at least 17 (well above league average) and have a usage % of at least 20. You get a high usage % by using possessions, either shooting, assisting others or turning the ball over-essentially ending a possession one way or another. The list of players that qualify is 42, but few of them are useful for my purposes. I will undoubtedly throw in a few names for context or when something interesting stands out.
With that said, how does KD compare with the best of the best in the NBA today along a variety of statistical measures: Read more…
Commentary
This team’s turnaround from cellar dweller last year to playoff hopeful this season ha s been nothing short of amazing. Most of us were there for the 3-29 start last year and saw lots of stinky basketball, but it wasn’t all bad. Most every game there was lots of inspired play, and great effort, but in the end, most games ended in despair.
Most surprising to me is the improved defense. I read all the articles and saw the video clips after the season about how Coach Brooks number one priority for this season was to improve the defense. Brooks was talking about it in exit interviews. Presti was talking about it in Summer League. I thought to myself two things: 1)”yeah right” 2) why not fix the offense, it’s worse than the defense. In my experience most coaches talk all day and all night about getting better on defense. I’ve heard it a million times. And I’ve heard it from more than a handful of coaches who’ve coached this franchise, yet for all the talk, I can’t remember ever having seen a team turn around a defense as quickly and completely as the Thunder have with virtually the same roster that was playing terrible defense at the end of last season.
This team right now is a top 5 defense. It’s not a fluke. It’s been consistently top 8 or above all season long. eFG% allowed is number 2 right now, sandwiched between defensive powerhouses Boston and Orlando. Read more…
Commentary
Box Score
How about them Thunder?
It’s a great time to be a Thunder fan. We’ve officially bagged our second 5-game win streak this season. That’s really something for a team that was 3 and freaking 29 before New Year’s Eve last season.
It’s especially fortuitous when the next MVP your superstar manages to have a bad shooting night while the team is playing the Warriors. Sometimes everything in the universe is properly aligned and everything flows majestically. Tonight KD missed two-thirds of his shots but the team still won walking away.
As you would expect, tonight’s game was something of a track meet. Golden State/Nellie ball is all about getting out in transition; they are willing to let you shoot unmolested for the most part as long as you don’t take too long to do it, so that they can get the ball back and get the quickest shot available.
But something is wrong with the recipe when one of the slower teams in the association (the Thunder-92 possessions per 48 minutes) plays the very fastest paced team (GSW-100 possessions per 48), and played at the Warriors fast pace (103 possessions tonight) and took them to the woodshed. Am I the only one who thinks Nellie is just flat out tired and bored and only hanging on to get the last ten or so wins he needs to pass Lenny Wilkins for the all time coaching victory record? Really Nellie? You really start Coby Karl on Kevin Durant in his first career start? Really?
Read more…
Recap
The mighty Thunder gave a valiant effort on the road against the top team in the East and come home on the down side; however earning a split on the roadie at 2-2. How’s that for a little sunshine on a rainy night?
Box Score Advanced Box
I just wrote last night in the recap that I was done with moral victories; that was for last year. I was spoiled by the recent success and I want wins. With that said, I actually need to contradict myself and say that I am not too upset about this and that I was pretty happy with the effort if not the outcome. Does that mean I am taking away the moral victory? I don’t know. Whatever. But either way, Cleveland is one hell of a good team and we did a very good job coming back from 14 down and hitting our stride with that 21-8 run in the third. To be right there with the Cavs on the road at crunch time is better than a win over the Nets at home I say.
Cleveland just amazes me. The sheer amount of talent on that team is hard to get your arms around. I guess if money is no object you can buy whatever you want and Cleveland has signed up tons of quality players. Shaq? Well he is a shell of his former self, but he is still a hog in the paint and he changes shots and has a little mojo. He is still a game changer in his reduced capacity and increased girth. They didn’t have their first or second option at PG because Delonte and Mo were in the MASH unit? No worries, just trot out Boobie Gibson. He can hit some shots as you probably noticed. He doesn’t need to assist on any shots because Lebron does all of that. Big Z, Varajao, Parker, it’s just a bit mind boggling.
I think the big picture view of the game however was defense. The Thunder and the Cavs are both top five defensive teams in the association depending on how you want to measure it. They are both tied for league best at FG% allowed with 43.6%. The teams are number 4 and 5 in points allowed per game. The Thunder are number 4 in defensive rating and Cleveland is number 6. The Thunder are number 1 in eFG% allowed and Cleveland is number 3. Yet tonight Cleveland held the Thunder to 38% on field goals and 41.3% eFG, while themselves shooting 49% on field goals and painful 58% eFG. The Cavs got it done defensively and the Thunder didn’t.
The little things matter and this game could’ve been had. The Cavs left the door open for us to steal by shooting a ridiculous 50% from the free throw line and committing 17 turns. But the Thunder couldn’t even get a third of their shots to fall in the fourth quarter after some brilliant play in the third.
Read more…
Recap
