Let’s face it: It’s very very hard to compete with what OKC has done… become the best team in the league and the team with the most draft picks? What Presti has done is pretty unprecedented.

Frankly I’m more comfortable comparing our team to Boston, who also has better depth but found it late in the draft or kicked to the curb.

That said, I think you’re all underestimating Leon and Aller. I bet they net us some bench goodies at the deadline by working the contacts and crunching the numbers.

We rank 14th in the league, and that seems about right really. Yes, we’ve had the easy schedule, but we also started off VERY rough defensively and seem to have improved a bit. The underlying numbers look how you’d expect a Thibs defense to look: decent in defensive eFG%, not so great in turnovers created, solid in defensive FT/FGA. We allow a not-so-hot 3PT% but our 2PT% allowed has gotten steadily better as the season has gone on.

The thing that’s most worrying about this team is a potential injury spiral. We lean very heavily on the top six guys in our rotation, and when one goes down, those minutes have to go somewhere. When one or two guys gets hurt, Thibs is just going to play the other top six players more minutes to compensate.

OKC got useful minutes last night from guys who are probably their 9th-12th best players. They’re not afraid to play those guys. They got 66 minutes from their bench and we got 36. Presti has done an exceptional job of backfilling their roster with guys that can go out there and not kill you. In a sense he has mastered the art of “iteration” that the Dodgers have done so well in MLB (and which David Stearns also seems to understand). I had almost forgotten that they drafted Nicola Topic last year, a true lottery talent who is a perfect fit for them, should be an excellent ball dominant Goran Dragic-style guard for them who can run the offense when SGA sits. He’s out for the year with an injury but he’s an excellent prospect. They’re playing the long game.

A lot of attention gets paid to the big asset haul that Presti pulled off, but he has also done an incredible job of making smart little moves around the margins. They’re like a bottomless well of talent.

To my mind, this was the confluence of two issues that are not related to our offense per se. The first is that our guys were clearly tired–and that is because we currently have no bench. I think we would’ve put up a much more robust fight in the 4th if we had a bit more depth. The second issue, as I saw it, was the exceedingly lax whistle (which I think affected us our gameplan more than OKC without being the difference-maker, for whatever that’s worth) that allowed them to flawlessly execute their strategy of blitzing Brunson and KAT. Maybe we have no answer for our stars getting mugged.

This is not to say that there weren’t real offensive issues–there was too much of Brunson trying to break the blitz after the refs had made it clear that nothing but the most egregious muggings would be called on either side–but it seemed like the bigger problem, to my eye at least, was simply being unable to defend a simple action in the 4th.

Respectfully, I just don’t see it this way. We have the #2 offense in the NBA, yet were held to 107 points, and 41 points in the second half. It’s a given that our defense is just okay at best, so it is not useful to pin this on our D.

Again, we were held to 41 points in the second half, so the game evolved into a defensive struggle, and we are not going to win those kinds of games against the better 2-way teams, not with the likes of JB and KAT on the floor. Who were the weak links defensively for the Thunder? Who could we isolate and attack, whether in iso or in PnR? I sure didn’t see anyone. KAT didn’t have a single open look from 3 all game. Neither did Payne. Brunson went 0-5, mainly on contested looks. Hart had more attempts than KAT, Brunson, Payne and Shamet combined. How is that not on the offense?

If we actually do pull those kinds of games out against the likes of the Celts, Cavs, or Thunder, it’s probably because they are missing good looks or getting a bad whistle.

So far, your greatest contribution has been teaching me that Markanen has two Ks in it

You mean Markaten?