It is not the biggest problem facing the NBA, and it is not really the Oklahoma City Thunder's fault, but it is unfortunate that the best team in the sport is such lousy television. It's more accurate to say that the basketball that the Thunder play is absolutely masterful, equally astonishing and infuriating in interesting ways, but that the games in which they play it tend not to be very compelling. The NBA Cup quarterfinal game against the Phoenix Suns that got OKC to Saturday's semifinal game was a good example of this, and a totally miserable sit. It was never close, the Thunder won every quarter by between 11 and 15 points and shot 59 percent from the field and 55 percent from three, and the only tension lay in whether the Thunder would win by 50 and how far apex irritant Dillon Brooks' plus-minus figure for the game could be pushed into overt psychedelia. The Thunder won by 49; Brooks finished at -47. The highlights feature all the seamless and metronomic Thunder offense you'd expect, but the game itself was like one of those endurance videos where someone loops the saxophone part from "Careless Whisper" for 10 hours.
The Thunder came into Saturday's NBA Cup semifinal against the San Antonio Spurs with a 24-1 record that both tied them for the best start in league history and might actually understate how dominant they've been over the season's first two months. They had won 16 straight since that sole loss, which came against the Blazers on November 6. It wasn't just that the Thunder romped in those wins, many of which came against lousy teams and virtually none of which were competitive either in the box score or in the moment, but that they didn't really reveal anything about how better or luckier teams might beat them. The Thunder are just exasperating—impossibly physical and obnoxious on defense in a way that wrecks teams' capacity to counterpunch, and patient and ruthless on offense in a way that swiftly puts games out of reach.
There isn't really an active game-plan on how to win against a team that plays like this, and is as deep as the Thunder are. It's hard to imagine what such a plan could be, although postgame analyst Dirk Nowitzki, after the Spurs 111-109 victory on Saturday night, did his best when he said "if you want to beat OKC, you've got to keep the turnovers down, hope they have an off night." Even after a thrilling and utterly convincing win, this was the best anyone could do: the basketball version of the unconvincing advice people give about how to survive a bear attack. Make yourself big and loud, or uh small and quiet. Run away, or don't. No guarantees, of course; the idea is to give yourself a chance of getting out of there with some number of limbs still attached.
On Saturday, in one of the best games of the season, the Spurs proved that they are as good as any team in the league when at full strength, and delivered a three-point program for beating the Thunder. It's as simple as this:
1. Have the most disruptive defensive player in the sport on your team, and also make sure he is angry.
Victor Wembanyama was limited to just 20 minutes in his first game back after missing a month with a calf strain, but did as much in those minutes as any basketball player could. After the Thunder raced out to one of their patented first-quarter leads—this is distinct from one of their equally frequent second- or third- or fourth-quarter leads primarily because it happens earlier in the game—the Spurs erased it in the second quarter thanks to some stupendous minutes from Wembanyama. The Spurs ended the first half on a 13-0 run, and Wembanyama was a staggering +20 in those seven first-half minutes.
He was even better in the fourth quarter, when the Spurs seized and kept the lead. The minutes limit seemed to work in his favor, here, as he was free not to pace himself; the spectacle of Wemby tearing ass up and down the floor and going headlong after offensive rebounds recalled for me the experience of watching MLB starters blithely and uncharacteristically sitting 103 during a 15-pitch All-Star Game appearance. Of course they can throw that hard, but the rigors of their job requires that they pace themselves.
Wemby's minutes limit seemed to serve not just to ease him back into action, but to lift the limit on how much basketball a person could fit into those minutes. It was a lot, and vintage Wemby both in terms of how much overt physical comedy it contained—the rebounds and blocks that seem somehow CGI-enhanced, the rough acres of hardwood covered in a few springing steps—and in how much nastier he was about it than you might expect. Wembanyama has looked stronger and more assertive with every game he's played, but he also manifestly does not like the Thunder and seemed especially motivated and bracingly rude about making that known. Some of this came in the traditional forms—flexing on Cason Wallace after absorbing a hard foul, calling Alex Caruso a rude name after absorbing like five or six of Caruso's signature mini-fouls in one shot attempt. His 15-point fourth quarter was full of moments like these, and they won San Antonio the game.
But there was also the astonishment of seeing just how much of the Thunder's offense Wembanyama managed to take away simply through his presence on the defensive end. The numbers are plain—the Spurs are the second-best defensive team in the league in points-per-100-minutes with Wemby on the floor and fifth-worst when he's not—but plainly insufficient. He delivered some astonishing individual moments, including a long and vivid sequence in which Wembanyama stuck with Chet Holmgren that was a masterpiece of gangle-on-gangle violence, and which ended with a block. But mostly the difference comes through how thoroughly Wembanyama changes the shape of the game when he is on the floor. His presence effectively forecloses on the paint and makes easy buckets seem so impossible to find as not to be worth the effort. Even for a team as good as the Thunder, this is maddening. The stainless, optimized process through which their offense manufactures open looks just stops working; they're left to do that work with crude stone tools, or just through a bunch of contested threes. That it still almost worked is why they're the Thunder. That they had to try to do it that way in the first place was pretty much all Wemby.
2. Have a player who is basically as fast and athletic as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander available as a counterpoint to the stuff SGA is inevitably going to do.
The Spurs played quite well in the 12 games that Wembanyama missed, and in a way that might prove useful down the road. De'Aaron Fox was the team's offensive engine during that month of Wemby-free basketball, and he was excellent again on both ends in the win against Oklahoma City. Fox doesn't have to do quite as much with Wembanyama out there tilting things in his direction, but everything Fox does he does extremely quickly, and he repeatedly fought his way into the paint and cooked up some SGA-style perimeter offense of his own when it was necessary. Fox, Stephon Castle, and Devin Vassell combined for 67 points for the Spurs, and looked every bit as rangy and relentless as their opposite numbers on the Thunder. The scoring was distributed with appropriate parity—Vassell had 23, and Fox and Castle 22 apiece—in keeping with the approach that San Antonio honed in Wemby's absence. "It's getting closer to ideal basketball," Wembanyama said of the style that the team played in the last month. "Everybody has something to eat. Everybody can step up at any time."
The extent to which Wembanyama fit into that approach on Friday was impressive; Wemby seemed almost moved by it postgame, saying "I'm glad that we can still do it when I'm here...I'm just glad to be a part of something that's growing to be so beautiful. Pure and ethical basketball." But it's worth underlining how much Fox does to make this work. He's fast enough to get past basically any defender, and astute enough to know how to use his equally jaw-dropping knack for deceleration to pull defenses out of synch and get shots for himself where necessary. That's why Fox was worth watching even on the dreariest, bleariest Sacramento Kings teams he led.
But as Jared Weiss wrote in The Athletic earlier in December, San Antonio has built a very good, very complete offense around those stops and starts without Wemby around. Fox is a good enough athlete to get into the paint more or less whenever he wants, and he was there all the time against Oklahoma City, and the opportunities he creates both from the paint and through the mere threat of his ability to get there at will have been San Antonio's offense for the last month. Coach Mitch Johnson will likely tilt the offense more in Wembanyama's direction once he's at full strength, and rightly so. But the fluid and democratic offense that Fox oversaw on Saturday managed to stretch and stress the Thunder out in a way that precious few offenses have managed thus far, and Wemby seemed more than happy to get in where he fit in. The possibilities here, as with so many things Wemby-related, are almost unimaginably cool.
3. Play Perfectly
To reset: if you want to beat the Thunder, you will need the max-effort, max-motivation version of a player who is proportioned like one of the Na'vi guys from Avatar, and also a point guard who can get past any defender in the sport. Sounds simple enough, but that's not quite all of it. Also you will need to avoid making any crucial mistakes when the team you're playing against—again, that's the Oklahoma City Thunder, now 24-2, best in the sport by a wide margin—invariably makes their run, or just kicks its legs out on a weird shot attempt and goes to the free throw line. You will need not to melt down in the face of Alex Caruso's bellowing face and karate-chopping hands, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander doing this shit, and an impossibly protean and forbidding team defense. Simply keep your cool as they take the lead from you late in the game, and then re-take it in turn. Just make your free throws when they start playing the foul game down the stretch, and don't give away fouls when they go hunting for them. Just don't make any mistakes.
Just don't make any mistakes, and get the absolute best effort possible out of your resident Alien, an absolutely unprecedented basketball talent that no team has figured out how to scheme for, and also have your point guard playing at the peak of his powers. Do all that and you might be able to beat the Thunder by two points, on a neutral court. It's amazing that the rest of the league hadn't thought of this any of this yet. It should be interesting to see how widely this approach will be adopted.
