All it takes is one moment of indecision, of wavering confidence, for the Oklahoma City Thunder to sink their teeth into you.
Anthony Edwards, already one of the NBA’s all-time leaders in bravado, was uncharacteristically hesitant with six and a half minutes remaining in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals—a 118-103 Thunder win over the Minnesota Timberwolves to take a commanding 2-0 lead. A standard-issue high pick-and-roll with Rudy Gobert standing near center court left Chet Holmgren switched onto Ant. It should have been go time, but Holmgren’s length can elicit mirages. In the split second it took for Edwards to judge the distance between them, his indecision created an uncharacteristic lag in his shot. That hitch isn’t who Ant is.
Edwards has had one of the greatest volume 3-point-shooting seasons in league history. Only Steph Curry (five times) and James Harden (once) have ever hit more 3s in a regular season. Particularly in the two-man game, Edwards’s 3s have been brutally effective. According to Synergy Sports, Ant has shot 39.9 percent from behind the arc as a handler out of the pick-and-roll this season, including in the playoffs—a level of accuracy higher than in all of those six seasons between Curry and Harden, except for Curry’s unanimous MVP campaign in 2015-16.
But Ant’s touch from deep abandoned him in Games 1 and 2. He’s missed all five of his 3-point attempts as a pick-and-roll ball handler in the series thus far; he’s just 4-for-17 from 3 on the whole.
I found myself letting out a deflated groan upon seeing the hitch in Ant’s shot. It’s hard to prepare for the velocity with which things can snowball when you’re playing against OKC. Edwards’s hesitant pull-up hit the back iron, and the ball was tipped to his teammate Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who pivoted right into a soft trap—into the mandible of one of the greatest defensive playmaking teams ever. There wasn’t even time for him to struggle against Jalen Williams and Alex Caruso before Caruso swiped the ball out of Alexander-Walker’s hands. On the changeover seconds later, the Wolves’ frustration boiled over. After a bit of hand fighting between Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jaden McDaniels as Shai brought the ball up the floor, McDaniels gave SGA a blatant two-handed shove. A flagrant-1 foul. “I just wanted to foul him for real. I wasn’t even mad,” McDaniels said after the game. “I had fouls to use.”
It’s a dispiriting but understandable response. Two games, two second halves wherein Minnesota has been thoroughly outplayed. The Thunder’s second-half barrages in the series have the markings of champions past. This is how great teams demoralize their opponents. The effect is reminiscent of how the prime-era Warriors left no doubt in their statement wins, yet OKC’s approach is wholly unique. The Thunder dismantle teams on defense with help and hand-eye coordination. They invade every sight line and converge as soon as the ball is within reach. It’s an insistent, overwhelming attack almost irrespective of size. There are no real mismatches in a superorganism, not with how quickly the Thunder recover and fall in line. It’s enough to induce on-court paranoia. It’s enough to even rattle the best.
The Thunder are the second-youngest team in the playoffs this year, yet it’s hard not to think that they hold the ultimate blueprint for the type of team the Wolves want to be when they grow up. Williams has proved to be an ideal second-in-command for OKC, another player who can comfortably hunt for his own shot and make plays for others—while holding his own as a big in smaller five-man units. Holmgren is the two-way Infinity Stone that unlocks the Thunder’s downsized chaos engine lineups. Lu Dort has done his job on Edwards. When it isn’t Dort, it’s Cason Wallace. When it isn’t Wallace, it’s Caruso. The horrors are endless, yet they remain silly.
What the Thunder have done in the opening stanzas of the series is less an indictment of the Wolves and more a reflection of just how coherent the Thunder’s vision and execution have been. It’s conceptually aspirational, if perhaps unattainable in reality. But these bouts can help clarify a path forward. Edwards is three years younger than Gilgeous-Alexander. There is time for him to expand his game as he enters his prime, but more urgently, the Wolves are on deadline to figure out just how to maximize the resources around him. Minnesota’s profile, too, suggests a team with a special combination of ranginess and physicality, with skilled and versatile players all along the positional spectrum. And internal development over the course of an up-and-down season gave the team some hope that it might transcend last year’s disappointment at this very stage of the competition.
But while the newly crowned MVP, Gilgeous-Alexander, has an ideal infrastructure and support system around him, the Wolves haven’t quite offered Ant the same amenities. Once again, at the conference final level, the Wolves rotation is being pushed past the limits of viability. Once again, the team’s fate is bound to its two oldest core players, Gobert and Mike Conley Jr.—who serve as organizing principles the team can’t seem to live with or without. Gobert offers a raised floor on defense simply by being on the court, but his utter absence of touch, vision, and poise on offense has rendered him a liability against OKC’s swarm. Gobert hasn’t been on the floor to close either game—a reality that he’s grown more and more accustomed to over the past year. And for all that he’s done to vault the Wolves into the West’s elite, his presence consistently becomes vestigial in the latter stages of the postseason. It bears repeating until something shifts: There’s nowhere left to hide. Gobert won’t be the one who changes; it has to be the rest of the team.
That level of positional rigidity extends to Conley, who is doing everything he possibly can to keep the Wolves in the fight. But the degree to which Conley—who is 37 years old and, at most, 6 feet tall—has been essential to the Wolves is harrowing. He is the only player on the team with a positive on-court net rating; the Wolves have outscored the Thunder by 19 points in the 51 minutes he’s played in the first two games and have been outscored by 60 points in the 45 minutes he’s sat. I’d say that’s too much to put on a player who is, again, 37 years old and, at most, 6 feet tall! Edwards has begun his upward ascent as a nuanced playmaker for others when he’s on the ball, but it’s too much pressure to put on him to solve a scheme that is seemingly always three steps ahead of the Wolves. Beyond Conley, the team has no real caretaker or table setter on offense, relying on the downhill attacks of Edwards and Julius Randle, who finally had a bad performance in these playoffs in Game 2. But their drive-and-kicks depend on the outside shooters to hit their shots or win advantageous second-side drives off a tilted defense. That hasn’t happened in Oklahoma City; it needs to happen in Minneapolis.
The series still has time to shift in Minnesota, but one gets a sense that, even with the Thunder dictating the play thus far, they also have more capacity for adjustments than the Wolves do. That’s the scary part. But across the first 96 minutes of this series, there have been open looks for the Wolves that just haven’t gone in; the percentages can always swing back in their favor. The more concerning thrum of the series is that the Thunder have been the aggressors at every step. The game-changing second halves have been defined by the precision of OKC’s focus and the outlines of panic from Minnesota. It’s a series that could prove existential. “Throughout this season, we have been able to wear teams down to where we put them away at times,” Alexander-Walker told reporters after the game. “This is a team, and you can see by their record, where you’re not going to put them away. And you kind of got to play four rounds at a time. If it’s a knockout, it’s got to be a TKO.”
These past two games have got me thinking about the mechanics of shark bites. There is an allure assigned to the pounds of force a predator shark is capable of delivering with a bite, but that’s only one component of a shark’s efficacy as a hunter. A shark’s skeletal system is made up entirely of cartilage, enabling uncommon degrees of flexibility in its attack angles. That flexibility allows for the second stage of incapacitation, beyond the shock of the bite itself. Leveraging their wide range of motion, predator sharks will then jerk their heads around, allowing for the serrated edges of their endless procession of teeth to rip and slice away at their prey. Struggling only digs the teeth deeper. And there is always a replacement row of teeth ready to emerge should they lose the first row to wear and tear.
The Thunder have been at their best this season when they’ve sensed blood in the water. There will be a trail of it as the series heads to the Great Lakes. The Thunder are officially the NBA’s apex predator. There’s no fighting it—that only makes the struggle harder to bear.
