MIAMI — The Oklahoma City Thunder should have been angry.
It was Saturday night. They had just lost to the Miami Heat, 122-120. It was a game in which Oklahoma City star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was called for a crucial offensive foul with 1:14 remaining (the NBA said a day later it wasn’t a foul), the Thunder wasted a 12-point lead, and referees missed a backcourt violation on Heat guard Norman Powell in the final seconds.
The Thunder’s postgame reaction — the outward one, anyway — could be summed up thusly: Well, darn.
The reigning NBA champions are winning far more often than they lose; a victory against the host Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday pushed Oklahoma City’s record to 36-8, the best in the league by a wide margin. The Thunder don’t get too riled up after wins, they don’t get too flustered after losses.
They know what matters the most is what’s coming in April, May and June, and if they can find lessons along the way to sharpen their tool kits for the NBA playoffs, that’s what matters.
“Going through the playoff runs, we’ve been on the scene now for a little bit of time, enough time to be exposed to it, and I think the guys have kind of learned the nature of that through the playoffs, really,” Oklahoma City fifth-year head coach Mark Daigneault said. “It’s a series, you win the game, and everybody on the outside is going to talk about how it was a foregone conclusion that you won and that you’re going to run away with the series. And then the minute you lose a game, it’s the opposite.
“I think when you’re exposed to that enough, you learn not to trust it.”
The Thunder started this season 24-1, then dropped four of their next six games and six of their next 12. For a couple of weeks — gasp! — they looked vulnerable. They lost to the San Antonio Spurs three times, including in the NBA Cup semifinals. Talk of “the Thunder could break the NBA wins record” became talk of “what’s wrong with the Thunder” almost overnight.
They’re 6-1 since, the one loss in Miami by exactly two points.
“To have those ‘problems,'” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said, clearly breaking out the sarcasm about Oklahoma City’s perceived slump. “… Yeah, I think the biggest compliment you can give them — and the thing that just stuns me — is how they can sustain that kind of success and have that kind of success with a young roster. Usually, there’s some kind of agenda with young players. And that’s fine.”
The only agenda in Oklahoma City seems to be winning.
The Thunder entered Wednesday having outscored teams by an average of 13.5 points per game this season, which is ahead of their NBA-record pace of 12.9 per game set last season. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — recently selected as an NBA All-Star starter again — is the runaway favorite to repeat as the league’s MVP; sure, part of that is given the expectation that Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic may fall short of the league’s minimum-games requirement to be eligible for such awards, but Gilgeous-Alexander’s averages of nearly 32 points and just more than six assists per game are certainly MVP-discussion worthy.
The Thunder are an NBA-best 20-2 at home and an NBA-best 16-5 on the road (the NBA Cup game was at a neutral site, T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas).
“We trust our process,” said Gilgeous-Alexander, who was a prep standout at Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights Christian Academy. “We trust our development.”
It worked for them last season. Even with a “slump” this season, it’s working for them again. They’ve managed to be unfazed by the noise, whether it’s good or bad. They’re boring in that sense, in the best possible way.
“It’s not that you don’t hear it. We don’t block it out. We can’t block it out,” Daigneault said when asked about expectations. “It’s the nature of the questions you get asked. It’s in your face constantly. It’s more about, ‘Can you contextualize it and can you maintain perspective with it?’ And we’ve got a team kind of preconditioned to be pretty neutral.
“We try to maintain that environmentally around them with our approach and with the approach that they come in with every single day. But we’ve also got guys that have a pretty healthy emotional thing that doesn’t really go too high or low.”