"NBA people will tell you the toughest game to win in the playoffs is the close-out game," explained Mike Breen, minutes before the opening tip of Game 5 of the Western Conference finals, by way of laying down the stakes. "And that's OKC's challenge tonight, because Minnesota is playing for their season." There was a quality of pleading in Breen's face: A certain matte non-twinkle in the eyes, a tendency of the outer points of features to turn down. He was a man grappling with an expression, actively managing his mouth shapes and struggling to etch something delight-ish into the available margins. Perhaps you are thinking this is an artifact of botox. That is not your damn business! To me, Breen's face was succumbing in real time not to the horrors of botulism but to the burden of forced hope, like a granny knot working itself loose under strain.
Breen's problem: The Thunder, the West's top seed and by a huge margin the most serious-seeming team left in the NBA playoffs, won the first two games of their series against the Timberwolves, both played in Oklahoma City, in consecutive lopsided ass-kickings. The Thunder are a dominant home team: Entering Game 5, they were 7–1 at home in these playoffs, with an average margin in those seven wins of more than 24 points. Their one home loss, to the Denver Nuggets at the start of the second round, has started to register in my brain as possibly something that happened in a dream. I can remember no actual detail of the game itself; gone, too, is the impression it must've made. When I encountered the record of it on OKC's schedule this morning I made the face of one who has is struggling to read his own handwriting, a silent but unmistakeable Whaaaaaaaaaaat? Breen, unfortunately, is not allowed to make this face or any of its related faces while hyping up a basketball game on live national television. They pay him the big bucks in part for his ability to wrangle enthusiasm onto pockets of face meat and into mouth sounds that might normally be deadened by cold reality. This is real work.
Breen threw a prompt to a nodding Richard Jefferson, whose own affectation of optimism seemed somewhat more authentic than Breen's cascading rictus. I'm not saying that Jefferson is a golden retriever, but I am saying that it can be hard not to reflexively scratch behind the ears a being whose enthusiasm is apparently genuinely boundless. Doris Burke, awaiting her own prompt, seemed more appropriately somber, in the manner of one who is here to do a job. Behind them was the Thunder pregame shootaround. Had the ESPN broadcast team looked over their shoulders just then, they would've had their night spoiled by the basketball equivalent of a movie trailer that shows every one of a film's plot points and punchlines. Oh look, it's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, putting the ball into the basket while moving at something like 30 percent of full speed. And there goes Chet Holmgren, neat, a dunk! Also, there are no Timberwolves anywhere in sight.
All of which is to say: Woof. This was one official basketball game, tell you what. The Timberwolves made three (3) total baskets in the game's first quarter. In the second quarter, the visitors turned the ball over a remarkable 10 times, including five times inside the final 3:30 of the half. Hard as it may be for such a thing to go without saying, you would almost have to have guessed by this point in the paragraph that the Timberwolves had more turnovers before halftime (14) than they had made baskets (12). This was a damn bloodbath. Oklahoma City took a 10-point lead in the game's eighth minute, and a 20-point lead in the game's 15th minute, and a 30-point lead in the game's 22nd minute.
The last sequence of possessions that rang with any urgent stakes passed when there were still roughly 40 minutes of basketball to be played. Anthony Edwards airballed a three-pointer, and Jalen Williams finished the subsequent Thunder possession with a lovely teardrop floater. The Wolves committed sloppy, largely unforced turnovers on their next two possessions, including on a fastbreak that ended with Naz Reid dribbling the ball off his own knee. Gilgeous-Alexander improvised his way into the lane seconds later and banked home a twisting layup in traffic to put the home team up double digits with 4:34 on the clock, and the Timberwolves did not make another basket before the end of the quarter, by which time the Thunder were up 17 and hull down on the horizon.
The Thunder are so good, man. It's annoying to say this about such a young team—the NBA's youngest, disgustingly—but they have become so absolute as a force in so short a period of excellence that already they wind up feeling like an almost passive, only intermittently amusing test of all comers, like the imposing blank wall at the end of an obstacle course, or maybe (generously) the Ziggy Piggy ice cream sundae. I no longer tune in to a given Thunder game to see how they will do, but rather to see how long some hero-questing Beavis with grandpa's old sword and shield can survive their attention. The Wolves got largely creamed, but it strikes me this morning, now that I have stopped resenting them for spoiling my evening, that getting mauled is what my own expectations warned me the underdog was supposed to do. My heart rate has otherwise taken no notice whatsoever; my most interesting takeaway from this massacre is what it might have to say about the crazy-seeming personnel decisions recently made by a whole other NBA franchise. How about that David Adelman!
I suppose it's a function of my own annoying and self-punishing underdogism that I have to remind myself of the good and cool things this expected outcome says about the damn winner! Oklahoma City's team defense is genuinely outrageous. They don't require turnovers and leak-outs to score efficiently—Gilgeous-Alexander's dark artistry ensures they are never more than a minute or two of action away from a couple of freebies—but they are so adept at forcing turnovers, and so fearsome in transition, that teams really cannot afford to make more than, seriously, like two or three live-ball mistakes across an entire contest. A loose, undisciplined, vibes-based opposing offense needs to hit and sustain a spooky, supernatural kind of groove in order to avoid gifting the Thunder an unsurvivable supply of surplus possessions. For a Minnesota team that is automatically going to surrender a handful of possessions per game to Julius Randle's heat checks and retaliatory back-downs, winning a full-ass series over the healthy Thunder might be functionally impossible.
The Pacers are more structured and sure of how they want to do things, but also—and I am very sorry to report this—they don't have any individual player anywhere close to as talented as Edwards. The Knicks will need to avoid physically dissolving before they can think about advancing; truly, God help their poor troubled skeletons if they find themselves having to deal with even just a few consecutive minutes of the Thunder, at playoff intensity, in Oklahoma City, in the month of June. The Thunder reduced the Timberwolves to goo, and made Randle and Edwards, two fanatical competitors, look like overfed uncles by the sixth minute of the fifth game. It will take amazing courage and imagination for either of the East's remaining head coaches to even sketch on a whiteboard a plan for thwarting these rampaging youths.
This is not to say that the NBA championship is definitely settled, now that the Thunder have advanced. Weird things happen, man! But we are far enough along in this postseason to acknowledge—like grownups, with very little sobbing—that Oklahoma City is supposed to maul the other remaining contenders. They're so good that playing them to a Game 7 in 2025 is going to one day wind up on Nikola Jokic's Hall-of-Fame résumé. OKC's challenge for the rest of this run, contrary to Breen's introduction, is to avoid swerving their own car off the road and then over a cliff. History will judge them very rudely if they do not reach their destination.
