As the title states, every thunder fan needs to relax. We are currently 17 games into the season, or, 20.7% of the way through it. We have been playing out of our minds with shooting %'s that we should have expected to regress to a degree.
The team is still incredibly young. Extremely young. We barely made the play in last season and didn’t even get into the play off’s. Teams rarely, if ever, make the jump from play in to finals contenders like this sub seems to expect.
We have improved a great deal, that is undefinable. But we were not making an 8 spot jump in standings if we are being realistic. Mark is also young. Very young in terms of career experience. He was not a relatively well known coach before coming to okc and he, alongside the rest of this squad have a lot to learn and work out. Stop calling for his head/resignation/whatever other extreme reaction half this place seems to want. He will work it out, and if anyone has their thumb on the pulse of the team, it’s certainly not us couch coaches.
The giddey stuff has thrown an extremely unfavourable microscope on the entirety of okc. It would no doubt be causing a lot of discomfort for all of our players and the reaction from some before anything concrete has come out from any verifiable source does not help.
We have a few glaring holes in our on court game. Mostly a lack of size and rebounding. On top of this the addition of chet seems to have nullified a lot of giddeys starting 5 use. I have seen multiple instances of him being stuck on the 3pt wing while the rest of the team is finding the offence.
We will likely lose at least 50% of our next 10 games as we have a very tough schedule ahead. THAT IS OKAY. We aren’t trying to win it all this year. We are trying to see what our core unit plays like and how far we can take it with its current iteration. Anything over top 8 is considered fantastic. Anything in the top 4 is a God send because frankly, the west is stacked. There’s a good chance we don’t get to finals even if we finish top 2 purely due to the older experienced sides.
Let’s all just take a deep breath and smell the roses. We have done well. We are doing well. Our ship is being rocked right now, but we are in the best spot of probably any side in the league to weather any storms that come our way, largely due to the genius of presti and uh, picks. Assisted by a great coach and one of the most talented and deep rosters we have ever had.
It’s all going to be okay thunder fans.
To me size isn’t just length, size is also mass. Teams such as Minnesota, the lakers, denver, bucks, philly, Sacramento etc, all give us trouble as they have enough mass on court to push us out of the rebounding picture and make life tough. Especially for our thin young centre. Realistically having one of those big bodies at a minimum would be ideal for us. Put said big body on the other teams big body and let Chet come over from the help side to challenge shots. Let the big body box out and do work against the other teams bigs to allow us to crash boards easier etc.
I completely agree with you, I just see a lot of wild reactionary takes on this sub and feel that everyone needs to chill and remember where we came from last season to where we are at now. Any sort of decent landing spot inside the top 8 is fine and shows growth.