The Oklahoma City Thunder have options. Their best player got off to a rough start in Game 5. Before scoring a single point Tuesday night, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander committed three live-ball turnovers and a shooting foul, leading to seven points for the visiting San Antonio Spurs, and missed four shots of his own, including a pair of layups.
"If it was four or five me's out there, we would've been down 20 after the first quarter," Gilgeous-Alexander said after the game. The Thunder were not down 20 after the first quarter; they were, in fact, up two points, and would spend the rest of the night lengthening their lead and fortifying their advantages, cruising to 127–114 victory. While Gilgeous-Alexander struggled for space and rhythm, Chet Holmgren took and made some tough mid-rangers over smaller defenders. Alex Caruso and Kenrich Williams buried three-pointers off the bench. Isaiah Hartenstein threw in one of those goofy push shots. Gilgeous-Alexander had plenty of time to work his way into a groove. "The guys were great to start the game. I probably should never start like that again, and give us a better chance to win a ballgame, but the guys held it down."
It's not just on offense that Mark Daigneault has the resources for Plans B and C. When his first idea of a defensive plan for stopping Victor Wembanyama bombed, back in Game 1, Daigneault unleashed Isaiah Hartenstein to drag Wemby into the hell of endless arm-bars, and set Caruso and Lu Dort free to beat up San Antonio's perimeter playmakers. The Spurs have not yet exactly identified a counter-maneuver: After scoring a relatively cool 122 points in the series-opening victory, San Antonio's offense has become a painful grind, and even in their Game 4 win they were held to just 103 points, an offensive rating (102) more than six points worse than the figure produced by the regular season's shittiest offense. Yes, sure, San Antonio scored 114 in the loss Tuesday night, but they produced a sub-Wizards 1.06 points per possession during Wembanyama's 38 minutes of action.
Wembanyama was pretty bad in Game 5. The NBC broadcast caught Keldon Johnson giving him a motivational lecture before the opening tip, but this did not appear to work. Wemby seemed barred from entering the paint as if by a magnetic forcefield. Early in the game he floated around the perimeter setting soft screens and catching kick-out passes. His first shot attempt did not come until the game's ninth minute, on an alley-oop dunk amid the scramble of a messy possession in semi-transition. By the time of his third shot attempt, in the fourth minute of the second quarter, the Spurs were down eight points and fading. When Wembanyama made an effort to assert himself, it was largely by attempting isolation stuff against a set defense, and it rarely worked. He finished the game with 20 points, but on putrid 4-of-15 shooting, and in general seemed sullen and brain-boomed. After the game, he dressed quickly and snuck out a side-entrance without speaking to reporters.
Oklahoma City has the kind of depth, not just of sturdy defenders but of capable creators and finishers, that can sustain a pulse during a cold start for their primary dude. Nobody else has their same wealth of guys; it's not saying much to note that the Spurs are in a little bit more of a desperate spot on nights where Wembanyama can't get into the flow. They naturally want him to be more involved in Game 6. "He's got to take more than 15 shots," said head coach Mitch Johnson, after the loss. What was particularly frustrating, as a viewer, wasn't necessarily that Wembanyama wasn't taking shots. I am a simple person, and my primitive hoops brain has a hard time watching a man who can dunk the ball without leaping simply never approach the part of the court where all the dunking takes place. Tuesday night he seemed weirdly spiritually low, with the exception of the time when he rallied his teammates during a timeout and then De'Aaron Fox immediately passed the ball to a court-side spectator for a turnover. It was that kind of a night.
This was not a lovely basketball game, in large part because its most spectacular individual performer was out of sorts. Jared McCain was excellent and hit some cool shots. Gilgeous-Alexander did eventually get it going in the middle quarters, but without much by way of pyrotechnics. The Thunder do some very nifty offensive pinging, especially with their reserves on the floor, but Wednesday night their best passing sequences tended to lead to misses or fouls instead of cool highlights. You could hear it in the voice of NBA analyst Reggie Miller, whose only real strength as a broadcaster is that he is uniquely great at going OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH when something cool happens: By the fourth quarter, he sounded like someone who'd been driving with a toddler in holiday traffic for six hours: irritable, hoarse, and in need of a drink.
It's helpful to remember that Wembanyama is just 22 years old, that this is just the third playoff series of his career, and that he and the Spurs are still learning what to prioritize, and when, from his unprecedentedly vast array of basketball gifts. The problem, for both the Spurs and for the series, is that San Antonio does not have a spread of options to compare to OKC's. If Wemby doesn't have it going, San Antonio's main lineups become profoundly juiceless, and no amount of Keldon Johnson is going to boost them to Oklahoma City's level. Early in the game, with Gilgeous-Alexander missing shots and booting the ball all over, the Spurs were able to get some transition chances, and had a cool thing going where they would get a Thunder rim-protector back-pedaling and then pitch the ball to a trailing shooter. Julian Champagnie thus waltzed into a few early threes, and it all looked so easy that I even pondered the possibility of a durable Julian Champagnie Game in a series otherwise destined to be remembered for its super-duper-stars.
But the Thunder reined in the loose play: After seven turnovers in the first quarter, they had just nine over the remaining 36 minutes of regulation. Without the flow of transition opportunities, it became impossible to ignore that Wembanyama was going minutes at a time without getting so much as a toe into the lane. The Spurs reverted to using him as a screener and floor-spacer, almost certainly with the idea that he could drag Hartenstein up the floor and open up driving lanes for San Antonio's guards. This went absolutely nowhere. For one thing, the Thunder get world-class rim-protection from Chet Holmgren, in particular against a Spurs team that cannot get five genuinely dangerous shooters into a lineup. For another, San Antonio's guards were lousy on the attack Wednesday, rushing, overpenetrating, leaning away from contact, and in all ways failing to gain any advantages from Wemby's modest outside gravity.
Importantly, with Wemby floating around the arc, the Spurs lose all of the obvious advantages of having the sport's tallest man positioned near that ring up there where everyone is throwing the ball. Wembanyama had one—ONE—rebound in the game's first half, and finished the game with one—ONE—offensive rebound. Part of that was Wemby's low energy, but in the second half Jamal Crawford noted that the Spurs weren't doing anything to get Wembanyama into the paint early in possessions—if you're going to live and die with dribble-drives from Fox and Stephon Castle, you might as well have that tree-sized guy down there to clean up on the glass.
The Spurs can live with a busted offense if they are getting stops, as they did in Game 4. Tuesday night the Spurs just could not reliably prevent the Thunder from scoring. Oklahoma City has answers. The Spurs ripped off a 9–0 run to make it a one-point game in the second-quarter, so Daigneault called a timeout and put in three fresh bodies, and the home team responded with a 9–2 run of their own. The Spurs got to within eight points in the third quarter, which by this point in the contest felt like reaching with outstretched fingers and brushing the face of God. Daigneault called another timeout and got Hartenstein back in there, and the big man immediately yanked down an offensive rebound, leading to a dead-on three-pointer from Caruso. Caruso, off the bench, won his 28 minutes by 18 points; Cason Wallace, who was excellent as a defensive pest, won his 31 minutes by a whopping 29 points.
Some of this stuff goes together. San Antonio's guards missed one million layups Tuesday. They weren't bunnies, but if more of those shots go down, Oklahoma City has to do more work against a set defense, and thus probably does not shoot 48 percent from the floor. More struggles for Oklahoma City's offense means more possessions on the go for San Antonio, and the Spurs thus probably do not shoot just 40 percent from the floor. And then all my griping about San Antonio's buzz-killing positional cross-matching and relative lack of quality depth go out the window. De'Aaron Fox, I swear, is capable of running a good pick-and-roll and of scoring from at least a couple of places on the court. When shots aren't falling, a lot of reasonable stuff starts to look deeply fucking stupid and hopeless.
But since the shots weren't falling, and since the game was ugly, and since the Spurs are now on the brink, I am allowed to note that history will not look kindly on the Spurs assigning 7-foot-4 Victory Wembanyama to guard 6-foot-5 Alex Caruso while Chet freakin' Holmgren puts together a credible highlight package against Julian damned Champagnie. The Spurs don't have Oklahoma City's depth, or anything like it. Their sixth-best guy is a full tier below his counterpart in this series. The Thunder at all times have a whole very decent NBA team over there on their bench; if they are screwing around with cross-matching and odd lineup configurations, it's because they have the luxury of waves of dudes they can throw at a problem. The Spurs probably do not have time to flirt with the idea of leveraging Wemby's fourth-through-sixth best attributes, at the expense of the one extremely obvious thing. Victor Wembanyama is not ever going to be carried by his teammates, not only because he is very large and unwieldy, but because the Spurs are built entirely on the Wemby foundation.
It starts to feel cruel, to say nothing of obvious, to return over and over again to the observation that Wembanyama's performance is the defining variable in this series. The Thunder are throwing everything at him, and it's a lot. "With any great player, you're not going to stop him with one player," said Hartenstein, of Wembanyama's horrid Tuesday. "It's going in there, just making his looks hard, making sure he just doesn't get anything easy. I think we just did a great job as team just executing that. Again, he's a great player, so you just have to do it as a collective." Hartenstein is being modest, of course, but also: The Thunder really do have lots of resources to send at this challenge. They have the Spurs surrounded.
