Thunder 87, Celts 105

Some nights it just ain’t happenin’ folks.

Box Score

It’s hard to know what to say after a game like this. I’m no professional writer. I guess if you go to journalism school they may teach you how to channel your feelings into crisp sentences and tight paragraphs. Me, well, I just start hitting the keys and hope what spills out isn’t too gawd awful.

The picture is appropriate though. The first thing I began to think of after about half of the first quarter was a team getting totally handled; much like we did in the second match up against the

Lakers. I guess it just shows how great that chasm can be between the “okay” or “pretty good” teams and the elite clubs in the NBA.

First the C’s came out and really really lit up the scoreboard in the first. They were 12/19 and 4/5 from deep and dropped 31 on us. In the meantime we were able to only put 20 on the board. It’s not like we weren’t hitting our shots (we were 9/15-60%), it’s just that they were getting all of the offensive boards and hitting threes. The threes wouldn’t fall for us for anything tonight. Time after time we had open looks from deep and they wouldn’t go down. That wasn’t because of superior Celtics defense, the wide open looks didn’t go.

But the Celtics did play very good defense. Very good defense. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t always foolproof, but I think at every position from the first guy to the last the Celtics were better at the team defensive concept.

And I have to say: this would have looked like the Celts against a high school team if it wasn’t for Kevin Durant. I’ve seen just about every game Kevin Durant has ever played in the NBA and I don’t really remember feeling that way too many times if ever before. The rest of the team looked horrible offensively tonight. Horrible.

But I don’t want to scold. Some nights we just don’t have it. We aren’t one of those elite teams yet, and there are reasons the Celts are whipping their way through this road trip.

The Thunder did a bit of work getting the game back to a single digit deficit; especially effective was a funky lineup of Westbrook, Harden, Sefolosha, Green and Ibaka, and Sefolosha was guarding Perkins in the post a couple of times and really doing well. That unit pulled the team to within 7 before Doc Rivers put back in his big guns.

The Celts came out in the third and essentially put the thing away dropping 28 to our 16. We could only manage 5/19 shooting in the quarter.

Notes:

• Without being too hard on the young guys I feel I have to call out a couple. Serge did a lot of good things in the post. He was working his arse off trying to block out Perkins who had him by 50 pounds, but if Serge is only going to get us 2 rebounds in 22 minutes under the basket something has to change. Some quick math tells me that he was in the game for 46% of the minutes, and there were 70 rebounds available during the game, or somewhere around 32 or so available while Serge was in the game. That would be just about 6% of the available rebounds…….Pffft!

• Same to you Jeff Green. You played 34 minutes and only grabbed 2 boards. A  power forward you say?

• However, Jeff Green had a really nice slam taking Perkins off the dribble and beating the slow rotation by KG.

• The Thunder experimented with double teaming KG on the catch in the post, but this team is too good at sharing the rock.

• The Thunder even showed zone for one possession.

• If you were watching than you probably know that tonight Durant scored his 4000th point. He is the second youngest player ever to reach that milestone. (The Big Lebronski was the youngest)

• Did anyone else see Paul Pierce set a screen on James Harden and get knocked on his can for the effort?  Harden is no featherweight. Pierce jumped up and tried to sort of tussle with him on the next play and got called for a foul.

• Rasheed Wallace is really fat.

• You know how so much of the talk here on Daily Thunder is about the sort of Jekyll/Hyde play of our young point guard? Guess which one he was tonight? I’ll give you a hint, he was brilliant against rookie phenom Brandon Jennings last Friday…..

• Does anybody else think that Brian Scalabrine looks like a red haired version of  that guy from “Knocked up”?

• I don’t know enough about coaching to know whether or not it’s feasible to have a characteristically slow team like the Thunder do some running or not, but on the few occasions that Wilks and Westbrook pushed the ball after a turn or a defensive rebound, the almost always caught the Celts flat footed. The Celts do not want to run back on defense; they want to walk back and talk smack the whole way.
• When Etan Thomas came in I was secretly hoping he would just explode and deck somebody in Green.
• The Celts were dominant on the boards tonight. I was hoping we had learned our lesson from the Houston debacle.
• Brooks emptied the bench with just over 6 minutes to go. I was watching the end of the benchers play and I kept thinking how really really valuable D.J. White could be to this franchise if he would just rebound aggressively and work at defense a little because he’s got that shooting thing down pat.