When Oklahoma City Shai Gilgeous-Alexander spoke with ESPN for an interview on the court after the victory of play 1 of Thunder in the finals of the West Conference, several of his teammates gathered around them in support.
It is an exclusive practice of the Oklahoma City list, which has been using the interview strategy totally for one for a couple of seasons. And it is a practice that has been criticized by his teammates, such as Golden State Warriors striker and the four -time Draymond Green champion.
“There is a certain seriousness that is needed to win in this league,” Green said in his podcast in October. “And there is a certain fear that you have to instill in the teams to win. I simply do not know if they are instilling fear in the teams with all the joke and things after the game.”
If the equipment is afraid or not of thunder does not seem to import much. After a 114-88 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday, Oklahoma City is now only three victories from the NBA finals.
And the “Bromance” after the game is just a symbol of youth and the union of the team, two qualities that helped make the Thunder the best league team during the regular season.
“We are unique in the way we all get,” said Elero All-Star Jalen Williams to NBC News earlier this season. “And I think that’s what appears on the court. When you have 15 guys who believe each other and everyone wants them to work well, allows you to go out and play very free.”
The Thunder played for free with the melody of 68 wins before the playoffs, the best percentage of winners of the regular season since the Warriors 2016 won 73 games. The Thunder were fed by a tacaño defense, publishing a defensive qualification of 106.6, the second best mark in this decade. (Until now, in the postseason, that defense has become even more tacaño, with Oklahoma City publishing the best defensive efficiency of any playoffs team since 2016 with a minimum of 10 games played).
Thunder are doing all this in their own way.
The conventional wisdom in the NBA is that veterans charged teams are usually better that the playoffs time arrive. The Timberwolves and the New York Knicks, two of the other finalists of the conference, have average experience lists in the upper half of the NBA.
Meanwhile, Oklahoma City entered the season with the lowest average age and the lower experience of any list.
The leader is Gilgeous-Alexander, 26, who on Wednesday was named the most valuable player in the League. He averaged 32.7 points, 5.0 rebounds and 6.4 assists during his MVP campaign.
In addition to SGA, key players include Williams and Big Man Chet Holmgren, the second general selection in the NBA Draft of 2022. Veteran guard Alex Caruso is another important figure, which is in an ancient 31 years.
The whole group is very close, celebrating the success of the other.
Let’s take, for example, the striker Kenrich Williams, who barely played in each of the first two postermed series of OKC, except for the duty of cyclomotor. He played 10 minutes from the bank in the game on Tuesday, making the three attempts of shooting, including two triples. When he was on the floor, the Thunder beat the Timberwolves for 19 points, a performance coach Mark Daigneault praised as a “great energy impulse.”
The list was built slow but safe by Executive Sam Presti, who had to deal with the outputs of the previous MVP winners Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in the 2010s before being able to convert the franchise into a contender, mainly through the draft and cunning trades.
Since hired Daigneault 2020, Oklahoma City has increased its total victories every year, from 22 to 24 to 407 last season. During that time, Presti added players such as Williams, Holmgren, Caruso, the Isaiah Hartenstein Center and Cason Wallace’s guard to a nucleus that already included the defender of Gilgeous-Alexander and perimeter Lu Dort.
The franchise had to endure some thin years at the beginning of the decade, but now the young group is reaching its maximum point at the same time.
“Maybe from abroad, many people probably think it’s a surprise,” Williams said about the team’s success. “But internally, all in our staff and organization see how hard everyone works daily. Therefore, it is one of those things that is more like the moment of what anything else would be.”
And as the team continues to enjoy success, Daigneault encourages its players to be faithful who they are, even if they do not act as others expect.
“I am certainly not of his age, I am not as great as they are, and trying to be would not land well,” Daigneault told NBC News earlier this season about the training of the youngest list of the NBA. “So just try to be myself. I try to give them permission to be themselves. And we all work together.
“Everyone is different, all are of different origins, from different families, but our paths are colliding together at this time, and we are trying to make the most of that.”
