There was a sequence in the first quarter of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals where the Oklahoma City Thunder used a drive-and-kick and a swing pass to get the ball to versatile young noodleman Chet Holmgren, who'd floated to a whiteboard-perfect shooting position out above the break. Naz Reid of the visiting Timberwolves hastened to close out on Holmgren, who is a danger from deep. Holmgren showed a decent enough pump-fake to cause Reid to overcommit, and then darted to his right for a straight-line drive to the cup. Chasing a ball-handler from 27 feet is a tall ask for a big man, and here Reid was cleanly beaten. Holmgren's handles are certainly adequate to this task, and anyway all he needs is one dribble to get from the arc to a controlled one-foot gather. The last man back was Donte DiVincenzo, and DiVincenzo was late. This looked like a dunk.
Reid is quicker than Holmgren, and his movement patterns are more recognizably humanoid, so he was never far from the play. As Holmgren gathered for takeoff, Reid sprinted on an intercepting path and used his chest to deflect Holmgren off the runway. The impact slowed Holmgren's momentum—Holmgren still has the physique of someone who needs to speed-eat 100,000 beef sandwiches—which allowed Reid to make a reasonably controlled contest of what became a stalled, off-balance layup. The ball rimmed out, the Timberwolves gathered the defensive rebound, and the action flowed the other way.
The referees did not whistle for a foul on Holmgren's drive, and it is a testament to the inconsistency of NBA officiating that I only think I understand why. By the book—to the extent that this non-call would hold up under review—I think Reid continued along a straight and legal path, and may even have arrived at the point of contact just ahead of Holmgren, although without slow-motion replay you would need a hummingbird with a hummingbird-sized stopwatch to be completely certain. Had a referee whistled Reid for a foul on this play, no one anywhere would've batted an eyelash. But more to the point, and much more annoyingly, I think we all understand that Holmgren blew it on this drive by failing to anticipate the contact with Reid, and by failing to theatrically throw himself onto the ground. Holmgren attempted to continue through the contact, with a basketball play, and thus screwed himself.
Bad officiating played little to no role in the outcome of Game 1. OKC's defense was incredible, and the Timberwolves turned the ball over too many times (17), missed too many three-pointers (36), and were too weak and discouraged inside (10-of-23 in the lane, a pathetic 20 total paint points) to hope for a win. The Thunder simply made more shots, and as a result they pulled away in the second half. Probably Chris Finch should outright forbid any of his players from dribbling with their backs to the basket for the rest of this series; even in the part of the game when they were hanging in there, it seemed like every time a Wolves player tried a spin move or a back-down dribble, a Thunder player would dig down and steal the ball. The game was won by OKC's defense, and how it forced the Timberwolves into a bunch of shit they didn't want to do.
"We talk crowding around the ball," explained Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault, who considers turnovers a happy side-effect of coherent team defense. "We talk about being aggressive in our help, trusting our help, trusting our scheme, trusting our teammates. And that tends to yield turnovers when you really have that going. But it also yields tough shots, out-of-rhythm shots. So that's what we're trying to do." That amazing defensive mind-meld that certain pretenders showed only in flashes this postseason is how the Thunder arrive straight out of bed in the morning. An unrefined second dribble move that buys an extra second of probing in the regular season is, against a playoff-tuned OKC, a desperate low-odds gambit. The times when Minnesota's offense came closest to coherence were when a quick first step, a pump fake, or a screen bought a ball-handler an angle and he immediately took it, and then very quickly made the correct skip-pass over swarming help. Those attacking angles are hard enough to come by against the Thunder, without dudes passing up rhythm shots and available outlets in favor of dribble counters that function in this matchup like well-sprung booby traps.
"I definitely got to shoot more, I only took 13 fucking shots," said Anthony Edwards, who was on the ball a lot in Game 1 but too often turned down decent looks in favor of the good or great ones that OKC simply will not permit. "They clogged the paint, that's what they do. They bank on us not making shots, I guess. Because every time I go to the rim it's like four people in the paint." You hate to advise a hoops superstar from the comfort of your blog throne, but: Probably in Game 2, Edwards will look a little more favorably on the pull-up and floater-range stuff that he can get to reasonably comfortably against basically any defender in the world, and while taking at least one fewer dribble into OKC's defensive blender.
I bring up the Reid-Holmgren non-foul (this was not any kind of real moment in the game) and the officiating overall, because once again OKC's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drove opposing defenders out of their minds with his heavy deployment of the dark arts, and earned 14 free throws in the doing. Referees who otherwise were prepared to allow more of the physicality that spices up playoff basketball were put into the spotlight over and over again by SGA's relentless foul-baiting. Two minutes after Holmgren's failed drive, Gilgeous-Alexander threw a move at Minnesota's Jaylen Clark, up above the top of the key, and took a hard driving dribble with his right hand. Clark was on his hip, pivoting and sliding and trying to stay attached. Gilgeous-Alexander, sensing not contact but just proximity, picked up his dribble and blindly threw the ball toward the basket, from about 20 feet away. It was absolutely nothing like a basketball play, and the referees declined to bail him out with a whistle, and the ball banged high off the backboard, sending the action back the other way. Gilgeous-Alexander, for whom foul-baiting of this sort is now so incredibly bloodless and mechanical, didn't even react to the non-call. He'd rubbed a dime onto a lottery scratcher and gone unrewarded, but by no means did he consider a payday to have been deserved.
I can't be too mad at him for this. It's just how NBA basketball is officiated now: If a ball-handler gets a defender into recovery position, best practices now say to throw either yourself onto the floor or the ball toward the basket, or both; referees will reward it often enough to make it a winning play. Twice in the first quarter Gilgeous-Alexander had already been rewarded with free throws for theatrically flapping his arms, and one of those times he'd provoked Edwards into a technical foul of open disgust. By the time of Gilgeous-Alexander's failed 20-foot flop, his baiting had already been enough of a subject of focus that Doris Burke referenced the term "free-throw merchant" to describe how the league's presumptive MVP is perceived by online hoops fans.
Gilgeous-Alexander missed 17 of 27 shots Tuesday, but made 11 of 14 attempts from the line, and by the second half you could see how his baiting behavior had both rattled the referees and softened Minnesota's defense. He was getting a little more room at the elbows, and Timberwolves defenders were slower to contest his shots; meanwhile, in the third quarter, Gilgeous-Alexander used his off-arm to shove away defender Nickeil Alexander-Walker, then threw himself onto the floor. The nearest referee blew the whistle and very confidently signaled that Alexander-Walker—Gilgeous-Alexander's cousin—had shoved SGA to the floor, while Alexander-Walker and his coaches and teammates lost their minds. A replay challenge showed in pristine slow-motion that all of the contact had been initiated by the ball-handler, and that SGA had either tripped himself or flopped, leading to an overturned call. The replay also showed SGA sliding with the ball about 12 feet after falling, but the referees were forced to award possession to the Thunder. No harm, no foul, and also no harm. But, man, this is so fucking foul.
Obviously the NBA cannot change the way the game is officiated on the fly during the Western Conference Finals. That would be ridiculous. I certainly would never condone such a thing. What I suggest instead is that SGA and every one of the league's referees be sent to a prison in Antarctica for the remainder of their natural lives.
