Throughout the NBA play-offs, The National's resident NBA dudes Jonathan Raymond and Kevin Jeffers will be breaking down the key talking points of the night before, plus looking around the scope of the league. Here are our NBA Play-off takeaways.
Tuesday’s score
• Oklahoma City 95, San Antonio 91 | Thunder lead series 3-2 | Game 6 Friday, 4.30am
Who said the series was already over?
I admit it. I completely wrote off the Oklahoma City Thunder. I didn’t even wait for Game 2, when the Thunder handed the San Antonio Spurs only their second home loss of the season.
Then in Tuesday night's Game 5, OKC went and handed the Spurs another home loss, and are now a win away from eliminating one of the greatest regular-season teams ever. They'll have an elimination game on their home court. Amazing.
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Again, OKC. Sorry. I was wrong. You have Kevin Durant. You have Russell Westbrook. You almost always have the two best players on the court at any given time. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
Still, to have a shot against the much deeper, much more experienced, much more all-around-skilled Spurs, it would take sustained Herculean efforts from both Durant and Westbrook. And boy, have they delivered.
Game 5 was Westbrook’s game. He’s a perpetually infuriating player, as anyone who watches him regularly can attest to. Just as capable as he is of winning games on his own, he’s prone to losing them on his own. He’s a historically awful 3-point shooter, but doesn’t give up those shots when they’re open (or not open). He sometimes makes Josh Smith’s shot selection look good by comparison. He turns the ball over without abandon (8 times on Tuesday).
But no player is as athletically gifted or as fiercely competitive as Westbrook, and his force of will wins out more often than not. It did in Game 5, when he was – as Durant put it after the game – a “maniac” with 31 points, 11 rebounds and 9 assists. At one point in the fourth quarter he hit a most ill-advised, 31-foot three-pointer to cut the Spurs lead to 3, and it was all OKC after that. The lead had been 13 at one point in the second half. The Thunder out-scored the Spurs 26-19 in the fourth, and Westbrook and Durant were unstoppable in crunch time.
The end of the game stunned a San Antonio crowd spoiled by watching the dynasty of Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich hold up 5 Larry O’Brien trophies. When Westbrook is on, he rips the heart out of an opposing crowd the way few players can.
So often the narrative surrounding this year’s Thunder spoke of the Dynasty That Never Was. The Durant-Westbrook duo has made only one Finals, which they lost in 5 games to the LeBron-Wade Miami Heat. The past two seasons have been marred with injuries to one or the other. This year with both stars healthy, they were merely the team that was good, just not as good as Golden State or San Antonio. Durant would leave after this season or next, when Westbrook would also leave, and they’d try to start a new dynasty somewhere of their choosing.
All of the obituaries were apparently premature. From being drafted by Seattle and moving to a new city where they were the only show in town, it’s been a high-profile, sometimes-bumpy 8 years for the Durant-Westbrook Thunder. The only happy ending for this generationally great pairing would be a title, one that’s frustratingly eluded them. Those high expectations were always just a touch too high, but they aren’t intent on ending this chapter just yet.
The Thunder are not even halfway through these play-offs, but they’ve already gotten closer than many – myself included – thought they would again. And it’d be silly to say they couldn’t go all the way now.
Tonight’s games
• Miami at Toronto, Game 5, 4am | Series tied 2-2
• Portland at Golden State, Game 5, 6.30am | Warriors lead series 3-1
kjeffers@thenational.ae
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