Oklahoma City Thunder Won’t Amnesty Kendrick Perkins
By Josh Sanchez
The Oklahoma City were very disappointed with their postseason run, after being eliminated from the NBA Playoffs by the Memphis Grizzlies. Oklahoma City lost Russell Westbrook during the series against the Houston Rockets and it was all downhill from there. All-star Kevin Durant was asked to do too much and big man Kendrick Perkins continuously came up small.
This left the Thunder eliminated from the playoffs and wondering how to fix their team moving forward.
One of the options that came up was potentially using the amnesty provision on Perkins so they could clear his contract off the books and create some salary cap space, but Thunder general manager Sam Presti is not a fan of that idea.
“We just haven’t considered using the provision,” Presti said, via Darnell Mayberry of The Oklahoman. “I wouldn’t necessarily directly attribute that to any player on our team. Every team looks at the amnesty provision different based on their different circumstances. But it’s not something that we’ve really explored.”
While Perkins was absolutely horrendous during the postseason, Presti still believes that he is a valuable asset on the Thunder roster.
“We think Perk has a lot of value to our team,” he added. “He’s a member of a team that won 60 games and helped us to our third division title in three years. I don’t know that we can discount that. I’m sure he’d like to have had a better postseason. But I’m sure that’s pretty universal for the whole group. And we accept that.”
It wouldn’t be fair to use Perkins as a scapegoat even with his poor playoff performance.
The real issue was the team’s lack of depth and options behind Westbrook. Once he went down, Durant was all alone on the court and he was being asked to do too much against an exciting Grizzlies squad.
Westbrook will be ready to go next season and the Thunder can once again make a run at a NBA title. For their sake, let’s hope everyone can stay healthy.