Have you ever lost your keys? Or some other small piece of daily paraphernalia? You circle the house searching all the obvious places, then a few less obvious places, then back to the obvious ones. You’ve looked in the basket by the door a half-dozen times. The keys aren’t there but that’s where they should be, and the gravity of should is inescapable. Behind the basket. Behind the cabinet that the basket sits on. Then, for reasons you can’t begin to grok, you find yourself digging through the dirt in the potted plant next to the basket.
This sort of problem, the missing whatever, seems to create a psychological paralysis (at least for me). The boundaries of probability dictate that the answer is somewhere familiar. So the solution becomes doing laps around the same places, trying the same things, looking under the same rocks. It’s not there, but it should be, it could be, so look again.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are looking for something, and they’ve been looking for a long time.
Oklahoma City’s Finals appearance in 2012 was supposed to be the beginning of a Western Conference dynasty. They’ve won more than two-thirds of their games over the four seasons since, but they playoff success never materialized. Injuries short-circuited the plans — Russell Westbrook in 2013, Serge Ibaka in 2014, Kevin Durant last year. When that trio has been on the floor together, the Thunder have been blindingly good. The problem has been getting them on the floor when it matters most.
This season’s search is different. The balance has changed and the stakes are higher.
There is a strategic belligerence to the way the Thunder play and it revolves around the essential conundrum of their design. Westbrook and Durant are phenomenal scorers. Surrounding them with the simplicity to leverage their advantages in skill makes the team very good. It also makes them very predictable. This predictability has been a dramatic weakness at moments in each of their playoff runs, and it, strangely, feels like a much more visceral explanation than injuries. A failure of a body can’t be helped. A failure of offensive system should be fixable.
Right now the Thunder are tied with the San Antonio Spurs, two games apiece. We have seen the best and worst of Oklahoma City in their wins and losses and it all feels very familiar. Daggers from Durant, freight-train drives from Westbrook, turnovers, missed jumpers, aggressive ball denial unraveling one of the league’s best offenses. The Thunder’s offense has changed a little this season, better shot selection, a little faster pace. Billy Donovan has added a few wrinkles but in the final minutes of a close game, many of those wrinkles are getting smoothed out by a Spurs defense that has a plan for every contingency. The changes are small, not dramatic shifts in vision.
The Thunder are still looking in all the obvious places, for where their playoff glory should be.
There are all sorts of barriers between NBA teams and NBA championships. All things considered, tunnel vision is probably a better problem to have than a lack of talent or a surplus of institutional chaos. This fear of endlessly staring at a seemingly unsolvable problem from the same angle is why Frank Vogel is no longer the head coach of the Indiana Pacers, and why Dave Joerger will not be leading the Memphis Grizzlies next season. Vogel had been tremendous for the Pacers and by any reasonable estimation they overachieved this season. Joerger used an NBA record 28 players this season as his roster devolved into an athletic training triage unit. Neither coach was let go because they couldn’t clear every obstacle, it was because they kept tripping over the same ones.
Unfortunately, a new perspective or a new methodology doesn’t guarantee a solution to the problem. Often, it just means failing in a different way. It’s a difficult choice between the unknown and the not-quite-good-enough status quo.
The assumption is that this playoff run is a last chance to make this Thunder team, this configuration work. Durant is a free agent this summer and has already been linked to the greener pastures of San Antonio and Golden State in rumors. The natural line of thought goes that if the Thunder lose, they lose Durant. Seeing him leave in free agency could set this franchise back years. As good as Westbrook is, they couldn’t make the playoffs last season without Durant. One star is not nearly enough to be competitive on a championship tier.
And yet, this could all be academic. Empty column inches. Tweeting into the void. The Thunder are not favorites but they are certainly good enough to finish this series. Right now, FiveThirtyEight gives them a 31 percent chance of making their way through San Antonio. For all their stubborn predictability, Oklahoma City has been failed by their bodies and by pure dumb luck at least as often as they have been failed by their process.
The Thunder need to win two of their next three games to seize a measure of validation, to advance, and earn the right to roll that boulder a few more steps up the hill. They will approach that challenge in the same way they always do and, maybe, this time things will work out differently. They have been here before, looked for the answer in this exact spot. Just because they haven’t found it yet doesn’t mean it isn’t here.