2024-25 NBA Season Discussion

[Peregrine01]

If Caruso and Jokic played one on one, my guess is that Jokic scores 90% of the time. So it's misleading to say that it was just Caruso. He was the point man for a very aggressive Thunder defense that sold out to deny him the ball.

[parsnips33]

If Caruso and Jokic played one on one, my guess is that Jokic scores 90% of the time. So it's misleading to say that it was just Caruso. He was the point man for a very aggressive Thunder defense that sold out to deny him the ball.

100% OKC is filled with guys guys who cover the whole court with ease. Plus Holmgren and Chet inside. Just a beautifully constructed roster on the defensive end, that allows them to try all different kinds of coverages and strategies

[DorianRo]

If Caruso and Jokic played one on one, my guess is that Jokic scores 90% of the time. So it's misleading to say that it was just Caruso. He was the point man for a very aggressive Thunder defense that sold out to deny him the ball.

If they such little respect for you as a BIG to put Carusso on you then you should turn into 2001 Shaq on the bottom block against the midget. Don't even bother catching the ball at the top of the key. But since Joker is 7 foot and plays 6 foot most of the time, no one has respect for him

[Doctor MJ]

Why are you doubling down on a non-sequtir.

You: I think the defense might underperform because they may not have the mass to deal with Jokic
Falco: i think the defense performed to my expectation but the offense underperformed (hint: this implies overall underperformance)
You: Okay but OKC underperformed overall.

Cool. The defense did not.

But early on, the defense did indeed underperform, for precisely the sort of reasons I mentioned during the regular season, hence why I'm talking about Game 1 in that post of mine you just replied to and so presumably read.

Look, it feels like folks are trying to say "I predicted OKC's defense would find a way, and they did, so I've got nothing to learn here", which is frustrating given that what we saw in Game 1 is basically just what I was directing people's attention toward. Y'all may have learned nothing from it, but OKC themselves surely did...and of course I never said they couldn't or wouldn't. I just pointed out the concern, only to have it absolutely dismissed then, and then brought up again to be dismissed in a victory lap in a series where OKC couldn't avoid it getting down to a single elimination affair.

Game 1’s offensive performance was still several points worse the Nuggets’ regular season average… and below the Nuggets’ Game 6 level too. On the Nuggets’ side, their worst offensive performance was in Game 4, right in the middle of the series. I think people are justified in questioning this suggestion that Game 1 represented how the series would go barring some adjustment, when a) every team makes adjustments game to game, b) Game 1s do not by rule mean both teams went in with their default defensive scheme, c) the Nuggets’ best offensive game occurred late in the series, and d) arguably the most significant reason why the Thunder are so elite defensively is because of how well their personnel lets them adapt to a wide variety of opposing offences.

This excessive sensitivity would make sense if your stance had been, “I expect the Thunder’s defence to struggle with the Nuggets’ size in Game 1,” but you were not nearly that targeted. The Thunder defence performed well in every game; the fact one of two games where they performed comparatively not as well occurred in the first game of the series feels like something to which you would cling only if your primary interest were finding a way to justify your defensive skepticism as merited. For all your talk of “learning”, not only do you seem resistant to discuss why you underestimated the Thunder’s defence and were so concerned that “size” would be an issue for their defence, but you are also not offering much in the way of “here is how the Thunder ‘adjusted’ in the five games where their defence was even better (an adjustment which for some odd reason they must not have applied in Game 6 when the Nuggets had their best offensive game).”

In Game 2 the Thunder blew out the Nuggets and outrebounded them; what was the brilliant change in strategy which permitted that, and why did the Thunder not recreate that Game 2 success until Game 7? After all, the Thunder also outrebounded the Nuggets in Game 3, but the Thunder lost that game. And the Nuggets outrebounded the Thunder in Games 5 and 7, but the Thunder won both those games (the latter in a blowout). And the Nuggets outrebounded the Thunder for the series (even without Game 1), but the Thunder won anyway and held the Nuggets to their worst ever offensive rating in the Jokic era.

Alright, can we at least point to a personnel adjustment? Chet played his second fewest minutes in Game 1, which means it was not a case of Daigneault agreeing with you that Chet was simply too skinny to handle the Nuggets’ size. Game 1 was Chet’s worst rebounding game, so maybe you could highlight for us exactly what “adjustment” from the regular season occurred to help Chet rebound better (11.7 average over the next six, nearly double his Game 1 output)? Ah, but he had his best rebounding game in Game 3, and they lost that one, hm… Okay, was the “adjustment” related to Hartenstein? He was the biggest guy on the roster, so maybe the successful “adjustment” was playing him more… but no, he only had a +2 for the team after Game 1, which means that after Game 1, the Thunder outscored the Nuggets by 64 when he was on the bench.

It would probably help if you were a bit more specific about what radical and unforeseeable schematic adjustment you noticed from the Thunder after Game 1, because at the moment it looks more like all you needed to feel vindicated was a single loss where rebounding disparity was a significant culprit and that you would rather cling to that first game than learn from what for you must have been an unexpectedly phenomenal defensive performance afterward (what was that, like a -13 rDrtg? More?)

Re: Game 1 still below average for the Nuggets' offense. I mean, the Nuggets rORtg for that game was +8.6, which is a better number than the best regular season offense of '24-25, so any notion that the Nuggets' underperformed there just doesn't make sense.

Then there's the more important point: The Nuggets average ORtg over the rest of the series was more than 10 points lower than what they did in Game 1. When we see something like that we should be trying to figure out what the Thunder changed along the way to improve their defensive performance, and of course, it's not hard to find stuff if we look:

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Re: "This excessive sensitivity would make sense if your stance had been, “I expect the Thunder’s defence to struggle with the Nuggets’ size in Game 1,” but you were not nearly that targeted. "

I mean I believe what I said was that the Thunder may struggle with the bigness of Jokic - as in I posed it as a specific question of how well OKC would handle the bigness issue given the fact that we had seen Chet struggle with it before.

If folks stop looking to take my way-before-the-fact post as an anti-OKC prediction - which it wasn't - and instead take it as the sort of thing to pay attention to to understand how the series is evolving, sure seems like it was a good gauge.

But in terms of the "You didn't say Game 1!" thing, man, just like you said in your post, we know teams make adjustments, and hence if the team figures out what they need to with an adjustment, it doesn't the original concern was invalid. Rather, the fact that adjustments were needed affirms that the concern was valid.

I'd say you're also implying that because we all knew there would be adjustments, that those tsk-tsking my concern were essentially right all along...but no one here was predicting a 7 game series led alone that OKC's final form in it would have Chet as the only big and Caruso guarding Jokic, and so any claim of "I saw all this coming" is just plain silly.

To me, if you were pushing back against the idea that Denver would be a challenge beforehand and now you're taking a victory lap, what you're essentially doing is flipping a coin and then crowing when your guess was right.

Mind you, as I've said the whole time: I never predicted Denver. We all favored OKC, I was just the guy pointing out concerns.

Re: what brilliant strategy caused OKC to do better at rebounding in Game 2? I mean, first and foremost, it's not a matter of whether I have the answer so much as the fact that things played out very differently, and there are basketball reasons for that.

But what would I point to? Well, OKC made a point to make it harder for Jokic to exploit Chet, with part of that absolutely making use of iHart (which was surely part of why they acquired iHart), and part of that being the use of sneaky double teams (the kind that would have been "illegal defense" in earlier eras). Certainly not a coincidence that Jokic shot a lot less and also got a lot less rebounds after he absolutely torched them in Game 1.

Now, I do get the question of "They knew Jokic was Jokic so why didn't they do this in Game 1?" as well as "If OKC had done this in Game 1, then you wouldn't be able to point to Game 1 Doc!". It's complicated and certainly part of it involves players getting more comfortable with knowing how not to get manipulated by that opponent - typically with the help of coaches showing them what they were doing wasn't working.

I also think that when it comes to adjustments there are reasons why teams tend to not overthink them in Game 1. The logic of "We need to play our game that got us here" really does make a lot of sense to start the series, because you know that that's your best approach against a typical team and thus any change basically represents you making your team worse in order to make the other team less effective at what they do best, and that can do more harm to your team than it does to the opponent.

That said, if Game 1 looked great for OKC and from there they just kept winning in an easy series, I wouldn't have objected so much to people taking an OKC >>> Denver victory lap. That fact that this series went the full length just makes any notion that Denver wouldn't pose a particular threat kinda proven false as I see it.

Re: Nuggets won rebounding battle in Game 5 & 7 but still lost! Well first, they didn't win by an overwhelming margin so it's really not that big of a deal. I was never saying that the Nuggets being +3 on the boards was going to be a massive problem for the Thunder.

Further, clearly if you're playing big minutes with Caruso then you're giving up some rebounding (and some offense) specifically for defense, which gets into the issue with saying "OKC's defense was fine, they just disappointed on offense!". They de-prioritized offense to better focus on defense in the matchup, so lower ORtgs are just what we'd expect when you do that.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the secondary scorers who disappointed in the series didn't disappoint, but the fact it happened on both sides of the ball while teams were focused on playing extremely attentive defense is also probably not unrelated.

Re: Chet played least in Game 1, so apparently Daigneault didn't think Chet being skinny was a problem. I mean, if he didn't think it was a problem, he would have kept Chet as the primary man defender on Jokic. I felt it was pretty clear that iHart held up better one-on-one than Chet, though I welcome others sharing data that might make me change my mind.

As I alluded to, the interesting thing to me is that by the end OKC neither Chet nor iHart was the one guarding Jokic, and iHart had been relegated to bench-type minutes. iHart was there to provide some beef to push back against Jokic, but by the end OKC concluded the best bet was to put a defender there who would have no prayer of stopping Jokic if there were no refs, and yeah, I don't believe for a second that anyone here predicted that to be how the Thunder would take control of Game 7.

This is another way of saying that if you're not crediting Daigneault for making great adjustments in this series, you're doing him a disservice. I'll mock Daigneault plenty for his overly simplistic end-game-fouling strategy, but the Thunder basically kept trying new things all through the series, and it really paid off.

Back to Chet: Why was he playing in the end when iHart wasn't? It absolutely wasn't because OKC wanted him as Jokic's man defender. It was because of the other things he brings to the table - offense, helper shot-blocking, etc.

Re: got better in this game, but worse in this game, then better etc. So, I'd say in general what's going on here is that with every game adjustments are happening - both from coaching, and players getting savvier - and the goal of those adjustments isn't as simple as "now we figured out X, and we'll never have any such issues again".

I think thinking about it a bit like "points of emphasis" for the refs is wise. Players can only focus on so many things at once, and when they are given something new to address, other things fall from front of mind. So yeah, clearly after Game 1 the Thunder really focused on improving on the boards, but from there other things happen and so it's not going to be as simple as "Now we've got the rebounding thing figured out, and we'll never have such issues again."

I suppose the general thing I'm saying here is that the ups & downs of the series don't mean "I guess X didn't actually matter". If a team gets outrebounded like crazy in Game 1, that clearly mattered, and so they had to focus on correcting that. If that's all they needed to do then we'd expect 4 blow out wins from OKC to earn the back door sweep, but Denver was adapting too, and so OKC kept on giving up games to Denver. They won more than they lost in the end so they advance, but this series was a dog fight that was absolutely a learning experience for the players.

[DorianRo]

Moron ANT already picking up T's. That was why my concern with the Wolves having no chance this series. Not that they came compete (Regular season showed they could), they are just brainless immature goofs and with low IQ. Horrible qualities to have for a Post season run when you get in the late rounds. OKC will cause 1000000 turnovers the longer this series goes on

[sp6r=underrated]

Moron ANT already picking up T's. That was why my concern with the Wolves having no chance this series. Not that they came compete (Regular season showed they could), they are just brainless immature goofs and with low IQ. Horrible qualities to have for a Post season run when you get in the late rounds. OKC will cause 1000000 turnovers the longer this series goes on

This is a horrible description of a team playing in its second straight CF despite not having overwhelming talent. They aren't a bad club but no one looks at Minnesota's roster and goes "they overwhelm teams with talent." Despite that they are making their second straight deep run at a title.

[DorianRo]

Moron ANT already picking up T's. That was why my concern with the Wolves having no chance this series. Not that they came compete (Regular season showed they could), they are just brainless immature goofs and with low IQ. Horrible qualities to have for a Post season run when you get in the late rounds. OKC will cause 1000000 turnovers the longer this series goes on

This is a horrible description of a team playing in its second straight CF despite not having overwhelming talent. They aren't a bad club but no one looks at Minnesota's roster and goes "they overwhelm teams with talent." Despite that they are making their second straight deep run at a title.

They probably don't even get by the Warriors if Steph doesn't get injured. (I doubt they do since Warriors could have stole 1-2 games even without Steph) Very low IQ ball club. Last year they overachieved kind of considering their immaturity low IQ level

[sp6r=underrated]

Moron ANT already picking up T's. That was why my concern with the Wolves having no chance this series. Not that they came compete (Regular season showed they could), they are just brainless immature goofs and with low IQ. Horrible qualities to have for a Post season run when you get in the late rounds. OKC will cause 1000000 turnovers the longer this series goes on

This is a horrible description of a team playing in its second straight CF despite not having overwhelming talent. They aren't a bad club but no one looks at Minnesota's roster and goes "they overwhelm teams with talent." Despite that they are making their second straight deep run at a title.

They probably don't even get by the Warriors if Steph doesn't get injured. Very low IQ ball club

Last year they knocked out the defending champs, on the road, down by 20 in G7. Maybe they would have lost to GS. Post-trade GS was playing great. But even if you consider GS the favorite your write-up is pure hyperbole based on the way this team has played the last couple of years.

[DorianRo]

Here comes the turnovers like I expected with this Wolves team. . this series is over dude.. Wolves will be lucky to win a game with the way they take care of the ball LOL. Thunder feast on turnovers. Thats where they are at their best

[sp6r=underrated]

Here comes the turnovers like I expected with this Wolves team. . this series is over dude.. Wolves will be lucky to win a game with the way they take care of the ball LOL. Thunder feast on turnovers. Thats where they are at their best

OKC has the greatest point differential in NBA HISTORY. Unless Minnesota gets walloped 2001 WCF style, it will be mostly the story of an ATG team rolling.

[eminence]

I don't think any player has ever made me eat as much crow as '25 PO Randle.

[sp6r=underrated]

I don't think any player has ever made me eat as much crow as '25 PO Randle.

Same. I think it was a good decision based on the information the Knicks had at the time but I'm beginning to regret the move.

[DorianRo]

Well.. Theres always next year. Thunder have this title wrapped up.. Theres no team left in the playoffs to stop them. Spurs/Mavs will be interesting to see the strides they take. I bet they will be good next season and a problem for the Thunder. its gonna be a low ratings finals Pacers/knicks are complete duds next to the thunder and pretty much G-league in comparison. And as great as the Thunder are, they aren't really a "must see big money team" watch". I would imagine its gonna be low rating Spurs/Pistons or whatever that finals was that one years.

May depend on where giannes goes too. If he goes to the Spurs, there gonna be a major roadblock for for the thunder

[eminence]

Conley/Reid/DDV/NAW a combined 7/39 from the floor on decent looks, not going to get it done. Not exactly a masterclass from the top 4 either.

Wolves have looked pretty good with Rudy in.

[TheGOATRises007]

Minnesota have no shot if Ant isn't aggressive

He was awful the entire 2nd half

[DorianRo]

Warriors with steph probably would have been tougher cause thunder would have at least chased steph around all night and change their defense up a bit. Wolves just cant shoot and turn the ball over wayy to much

[Special_Puppy]

Minnesota have no shot if Ant isn't aggressive

He was awful the entire 2nd half

Big thing from him this post-season is his incredible playmaking leap which was just not at all tonight

[Special_Puppy]

I don't think any player has ever made me eat as much crow as '25 PO Randle.

Same. I think it was a good decision based on the information the Knicks had at the time but I'm beginning to regret the move.

Your prefer him over big Purr?

[EmpireFalls]

Minnesota have no shot if Ant isn't aggressive

He was awful the entire 2nd half

Think his ankle injury was bothering him, when he went to the locker room he came back a different guy.

But also if I had to design a team to defend him in a lab it would be Dort, Caruso, Wallace, and JDub. They are simply insane, maybe the best set of perimeter defenders I’ve seen.

[bigboi]

I am personally kind of at a loss for those that think Jokic isn’t as good as Shaq. I’m actually struggling in my head to make a case for Shaq on either side of the ball compared to Jokic. I think people are forgetting just how many stinkers Shaq had in the playoffs tbh, and that he had a lot of bailouts by the HOF guards he got to play with, and that his most dominant performances came against weak Eastern Conference teams in the Finals.

And I’m not a Jokic is a GOAT peak guy. I actually think LeBron and Jordan clearly peaked higher. But I don’t have Shaq at that level either (because of clear limitations on both sides of the ball).

These have to be troll posts at this point.

1. So Jokic who has NEVER received any defensive awards nor recognition is somehow better defensively than Shaq who has multiple defensive team placements and was #2 in voting for DPOY. Does that make any sense to you?
2. Shaq has lead his team 60 wins multiple times, Jokic has never. You can’t even use supporting cast argument either because Shaq had multiple seasons with a worse supporting cast than Jokic and we can easily bring the numbers up to prove it.
3. Jokic wasn’t even good this OKC series. 4 out of 7 games, he was flat out bad so this bailout argument doesn’t even make sense. Jokic was bailed out all playoffs.

Jokic flat out isn’t better than Shaq in pretty much any way other than shooting and passing. Shaq was more dominant, has won more, has had equal or worse supporting casts. It isn’t particularly close. Jokic isn’t on Hakeem, Duncan, and a whole host of other folks’ level as well. This needs to stop at this point, it’s ridiculous