2015-16 NBA Preview: Oklahoma City Thunder
By Justin
OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER
As the rumors of Kevin Durant’s potential exit intensify, the pressure to win now increases. Oklahoma City coasted for years as the precociously talented squad with scary potential, but youth wanes and the years pile up. The Thunder will have to strike now to have the greatest effect, but due to a few decisions over the past three years the team isn’t as strong as it could have been.
2015 in review:
We all know this story: Kevin Durant suffered through scary foot injuries, Russell Westbrook broke his hand just barely as the season started, and the team went through the wood chipper for a few games. Eventually, both guys came back, but not for too long as Durant bowed out mid-season. In his absence, Westbrook was fully unleashed, taking as many shots per opportunity as young Kobe/Jordan/Iverson while attacking the rim with a great ferocity. Unfortunately, they missed the playoffs by virtue of a tie-breaker as a season of Westbrook and Durant in their primes was wasted.
Rotation players in: Billy Donovan (coach.)
Rotation players out: Reggie Jackson, Kendrick Perkins.
The Thunder made few changes over the off-season, with the logic perhaps being the team is ideal and they just need good health. New coach Billy Donovan replaces the heavily criticized Scott Brooks; it’ll be fascinating to see how he’s received. Reggie Jackson was essential last season with the deluge of injuries, but he got too pricey and if Westbrook is healthy he was probably something of a little bit of a luxury. Kendrick Perkins was finally released into the wild blue yonder, though it was a few years late.
2016 Projected
Purely as an NBA fan, you want teams to be at their best and you want the best talent in the league surrounded with a good supporting cast. Kevin Durant will go down as one of the greatest players ever, and Russell Westbrook might be on track for the Hall of Fame with Serge Ibaka as an incredibly useful role player/fringe All-Star. This is a core that doesn’t come around often, and it shouldn’t be wasted.
I haven’t agreed with the decisions Oklahoma City has made lately, and it can be dissected using pure basketball logic. For a while, the team held onto Kendrick Perkins, a massive burden on a truly special offense, and when they finally dropped that anchor they replaced him with a polar opposite, a scoring center who is arguably the worst on defense in Enen Kanter. You don’t need stats for this either; subjective evaluations are harsh as well. Kanter might be the worst pick-and-roll defender in the game, and if Tiago Splitter, a very good defender, gets forced out of a game due to defensive quickness issues from smallball in the finals, imagine what smart teams will do to Kanter. And yet his contract will push the Thunder into luxury tax territory before the cap balloons[4. Insert a joke here about them not wanting to go into the luxury tax for James Harden.].
The starting lineup is still mostly intact, however. But there’s one glaring issue: there’s no ideal shooting guard. Andre Roberson is a great defender already, but he mimics Tony Allen in the worst possible way as he has one of the worst jump shots for a guard in the league. Westbrook is an aggressive slasher, and Kevin Durant doesn’t need an extra guy thrown at him because the shooting guard doesn’t have to be guarded on the perimeter.
Another option is Anthony Morrow, the opposite of Andre Roberson. Morrow is one of the greatest shooters in the league, but he struggles with almost every other aspect of basketball. This is taxing for Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant. Both guys are busy shouldering enormous loads on offense. Durant is underrated due to his center-like wingspan but he shouldn’t guard the best wing every night, and Westbrook is super athletic but gets distracted and loses focus on defense.
The third option, sadly, is Dion Waiters, who’s a shooting guard who didn’t even take a backseat to LeBron James and makes no sense on a team with two offensive superstars. Perhaps the Thunder were worried about a lack of a third shot creator, but Waiters isn’t even a good scorer. Kyle Singler is a fourth option, perhaps, but he can’t be trusted guarding shooting guards at a high level.
The rotation will have its hiccups while the team juggles players through the shooting guard slot and Enes Kanter struggles on defense, taking minutes away from a player perfectly attuned to playing with their mega-stars, Nick Collison. Thus, when you see statistical projections, Oklahoma City sits below the other contenders because of their role players, and partially because of the possibility to re-injury to their stars.
Quick statistic/graph
I quickly mentioned that Anthony Morrow is one of the greatest shooters now, but arguably he’s one of the greatest shooters ever. He’s currently ninth all-time in three-point percentage, and he’s a great free throw shooter too. His combination of those skills is actually rare. Graphing 3PT% and FT% together, as shown below, and there’s an extreme corner where shooters like Steve Nash reside and Morrow is right there with a small group of Steve’s along with Kyle Korver. He’s the type of shooter who can keep a defender glued even when Kevin Durant is dominating.
Summary
The Thunder have a shot at a title no matter what they do, provided they stay healthy, because their core is one of the best in NBA history. But a few strange decisions have given them an awkward roster, and they could run into rotation problems in the playoffs when issues come up with, say, Enes Kanter’s defense, as he gave up the most points last season from poor rim protection relative to the league average. The Thunder have a high variance win estimation, but there is some certainty: it’s tough to do worse than their last season and Kevin Durant looks healthy.
PBP-Metric[1. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 53.3
PT-PM: 53
Nick‘s[2. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 50
Nathan Walker: 54