The Oklahoma City Thunder did not just blow out the Memphis Grizzlies on Saturday. They annihilated them.
After a historic regular season in which they won 68 games with a plus-12.7 net rating, the Thunder started the playoffs by making more history: Their 131-80 win in Game 1 represents the largest margin of victory in a series opener in NBA history. It’s also the most lopsided win in OKC playoff history and the most lopsided loss in Memphis playoff history.
On both ends, Oklahoma City was even more dominant than usual. When it went on a 40-9 run to break the game wide open in a nine-minute stretch beginning in the first quarter, the Grizzlies looked like they were playing against six defenders. OKC pressured Memphis on the perimeter, swarmed any Grizzlies player that got near the paint and turned stops into easy buckets on the other end.
It was mean, and it was relentless.
Strangely, this was not a showcase for MVP favorite Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who finished with 15 points on 4-for-13 shooting (including 1-for-7 from deep), three rebounds and five assists in 23 minutes. Gilgeous-Alexander wasn’t bad — he blocked 7-foot-4 center Zach Edey twice! But for perhaps the most consistent star in the league, the shooting struggles were surprising. In a way, though, this is amazing news for the Thunder.
Despite their regular-season success, they entered the playoffs with questions about their offense, having had some slippage on that end during their second-round series against the Dallas Mavericks last year. This time, Gilgeous-Alexander would need more help.
Thunder show depth, defensive ferocity in blowout
If the opener was a statement win, then the statement is simple: Oklahoma City’s defense is suffocating, and it can create offense in a variety of ways. Jalen Williams scored 20 points on 10-for-16 shooting, plus five rebounds, six assists, three steals and a block in 21 minutes. Aaron Wiggins scored a team-high 21 points off the bench. Chet Holmgren had 19 points on 5-for-11 shooting, including 3-for-4 from deep, plus 10 rebounds and two blocks. Isaiah Hartenstein added 14 points on 7-for-8 shooting, all in the first half, mostly on floaters, plus five assists and a steal. Gilgeous-Alexander was on the bench for a good portion of the first-half avalanche.
“That’s what a team is,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault told reporters. “You don’t want to be dependent on one player for anything. Lu Dort’s a great defender, but our defense shouldn’t be predicated on how Lu defends, you know? That’s what teams do is they pick each other up and they compensate for one another. The whole is better than the sum of the parts, and that allows everybody to just stay plugged in.
“I thought Shai didn’t have it going early with his shooting, but stayed inside of what we were trying to do, played a really good floor game, especially in the third. I thought he came out of halftime with great intentionality. He just made all the right plays, got his teammates shots. They started doubling him, I thought he handled those really well.”
On one possession in the first quarter, Dort tripped and fell while chasing Ja Morant, but popped right back up and blocked Morant’s shot, which led directly to a bucket for Williams on the other end:
In the second quarter, with Dort on the bench, the Thunder could still field a lineup with four All-Defense-caliber defenders: Alex Caruso, Cason Wallace, Williams and Hartenstein. Look at the ball pressure, the communication and the closeouts that forced a 24-second violation here:
“It’s hard to have a run when you’re not stacking stops up,” Daigneault said. “And we have to lean into that as a team as we go into all these games. We gotta understand that’s one of the hardest things about playing against us is when we’re really physical and executing our stuff and engaged on that end of the floor.”
OKC expecting better effort from Grizzlies in Game 2
Memphis shot 6 for 34 (17.6%) from 3-point range, but the bigger problem, in coach Tuomas Iisalo’s view, was that it committed 24 turnovers. On a related note, Oklahoma City had 27 fast break points; the Grizzlies had just five. Going forward, OKC’s army of point-of-attack defenders is going to continue do everything it can to make Memphis uncomfortable, and the Grizzlies are going to continue to see bodies in the paint.
In Game 2 on Tuesday, Memphis needs to make better reads and find better looks.
“There’s two sides to every coin, there’s a yin and a yang, so the pressure and their heavy shifts, they open up opportunities,” Iisalo told reporters. “They are small windows, but those are the situations that we gotta use to our advantage and turn that conflict within the game for us.”
Morant said that the Grizzlies need to improve their defensive intensity, too. “They had a lot of easy looks, were pretty much getting whatever they wanted on the floor,” he told reporters.
It may have felt like the series was over before halftime of Game 1, but OKC still needs three more wins.
“If we win Tuesday, the series is 1-1 and this game won’t matter,” Morant said.
Daigneault certainly isn’t getting ahead of himself. He pointed out that Memphis had played “an emotional game” on Friday night and had to play an early game Sunday.
“They’re going to play a lot better than that [in Game 2],” he told reporters. “They’re going to be fresher.”
The Grizzlies may be less fatigued on Tuesday, and, after this beatdown, they know what to expect from their opponent. If it were easy to use the Thunder’s aggressiveness against them, though, then OKC wouldn’t have been able to storm through the 82 games that preceded this one.
