Thunder vs. Warriors was olympics of composure

The Oklahoma City Thunder had it in their hands, the most precious and fragile of basketball gifts — a trip to the NBA Finals. They had taken it from the Golden State Warriors, a team that had 73 games during the regular season, more than any other team in the history of the NBA. The Thunder pierced the Warriors shroud of invulnerability, wresting control of the future from the team that was considered inevitable. Once they had it in their hands, Oklahoma City squeezed a little too tightly.

When they looked again, it was gone.

This was just the 10th time in NBA history that a team had given away a 3-1 series lead. The Thunder missed opportunities, good ones, to finish off the Warriors. They missed shots, tightened up, through the ball away, retreated into the security of stagnation. Their defense gave way at the precise moments when they needed it the most. In the last three games of this series, the Thunder’s were outscored by 31 point per 100 possessions in the fourth quarter, a narrative thread that tied closely to the regular season where they had one of the worst point differentials in the league at the end of close games.

It looks like they choked. It smells like they choked. So, they choked right?

The narrative of the Thunder and this series seems doomed to narrowed down to a loss of composure. For four games, they were definitively the better team. Then they lost focus, gave in to the psychological demons shouting down the better angels of their brains. When it mattered most, Golden State had it and Oklahoma City didn’t. Sometimes the simplest explanations are the correct ones.

Composure is often discussed as binary situation. Some players or teams have it, others do not. The judgement is passed on the results and the most recent always wins. That’s why the Thunder can be described as lacking composure. Their first three wins in the series, the ones where they dismantled the Warriors with shrewd adjustments, careful execution, and efficiency in all the biggest moments, those don’t matter because they happened before the meltdown. A bitter taste is all that’s left.

It really is a bizarre way to evaluate the mental toughness of a team. Composure is an internal quality and can’t really be measured by external factors. Even a professional athlete can be cool as a cucumber and still miss an open jump shot. Sometimes nerves and fear feed adrenaline, and adrenaline and sweaty palms can still come up with a big steal. In sports, the word composure is never really used strictly as it is defined — the state of feeling calm (we would have no idea) and of being in control.

Composure then becomes a shorthand for ascribing explanatory power to the ebb and flow of a basketball game. There is an inherent randomness in all sports, and particularly in basketball. Players provide locomotion for that randomness with their bodies and decision-making, and certain players and teams find themselves more swept up in that tide of variance. It’s a make-or-miss league and when you rely on your best players to make tough shots against a tough defense, like Oklahoma City does, you are making a sacrifice — winnowing the random outcomes of a spiderweb of passes and cuts, giving over power to that black-and-white dichotomy of made or missed.

The Warriors were in a deep hole. Draymond Green’s physicality hit a crescendo when his leg hit Steven Adams’ groin, a play that — intentional or not — seemed to indicate a player out of control and flailing in the hopes of hitting onto something, anything, to turn the tide. After that play he retreated even further into himself, seeming to let the moment get the best of him. In falling into a backs-against-the-wall scenario, the Warriors too missed shots, turned the ball over, blew defensive assignments, and wilted under the pressure of the Thunder’s aggressiveness. After four games, it was their composure that was in question.

While they may have been playing without their edge, the Warriors never appeared to be playing without their placid confidence. As to the control aspect of composure, that’s all an illusion.

The Warriors won Game 7 because they scored more points. Keeping track of that margin is fairly simple. Filling out a ledger sheet on psychological assertiveness and the anxiety management is a fool’s exercise. Control of a basketball game is fluid, changing moment to moment, vibrating like a guitar string. As such, the idea of composure is a fallacy. No one has the market cornered, basketball players make basketball plays and at the end of 48 minutes a whistle blows and a trophy is handed to the team that made more.

The Thunder did not lose because they are not mentally tough. Their dominance failed them, just as the Warriors’ did in the beginning of the series. The fact that the Warrior’s failures came first was not a function of superior psychology, it was the margin of being a slightly better basketball team.

In the end, Golden State gets a trip to the Finals. Oklahoma City gets to head home and prepare their free agent pitch to Kevin Durant. In the Olympics of Composure, everyone gets a silver medal.