Thunder roll to Western Conference Finals
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What were the key moments in Game 7?
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily. Coming up, we had a Super Bowl on Sunday. Andrew Schleck's here to talk about Game 7 from every single angle. Game seven. The two best words in sports. Zena Kata, Espera Henney, Andrew Schlecht, Dave DeFore, NBA Daily, In the House. Andrew still in the Paycom Center Arena. You can hear the balls in the background if you're just listening. Andrew, what a performance from the Oklahoma City Thunder. Wow.
Yeah, defensively, this was their best game that they've played. They held the Nuggets to 93 total points, 39% from the field, and they really limited everything. I mean, the Thunder knew heading into this game that Aaron Gordon was going to be limited, and obviously he's great for their defense, but offensively, there wasn't a whole lot going outside of Nikola Jokic, and he didn't even have a great game. And a lot of that was the Thunder filled every single gap there was. They basically played eight guys in this one with their starting lineup, plus Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, Cason Wallace. And they had this revolving door of players. It was like they weren't playing like, hey, here's this lineup, here's that lineup. It was just a revolving door of players. And they're like, we're going to play five out. We're going to play all guards together. for two minutes.
We're going to play super big for two minutes. They gave them every single look, and I think the guys to really look at that had the intensity that you'd want, and this is not anything new, but it's Cason Wallace and Alex Caruso. Those two brought it off the bench. Caruso was the primary defender for Jokic for large charges of this one. Yeah. I've got Teddy Tumbleson here in the background. Matt Tumbleson's son listening in live. I love it. It's just great. Thunder PR extraordinaire. Yeah, I just thought their defensive activity was just different. It was special. It was that's probably the best defensive game I've seen them play. And we're talking about one of the best defensive teams ever to play. And we saw great stretches for them all year. That was the best.
And they said that they came into this with a sense of urgency. It was like, where was that sense of urgency in game six? But it was definitely here in game seven. And that was the difference maker. Yes, they made shots. They had 64 points in the paint, which was unbelievable. But it all started on the defensive end where the Nuggets had no answers. It was basically like Jokic just kind of just, I'm going to have to throw myself into these guys so that I can get free throws. And that's about the only thing we have cooking here.
By the end of the third quarter, the Thunder had four 17 turnovers and gotten 22 points off of that. And I definitely want to credit the defense. I think that was the start and the onus of everything for the Thunder. But also give credit to the Thunder for finally winning really confidently breaking the zone and we hadn't seen that really since game two them finding ways around the zone finding the gaps finding a way to take advantage of that and you knew that Aaron Gordon was going to be trying to be you know hidden on the back side of that zone and the swing swing you saw so many of that dunker spot opportunities Hartenstein Chet getting up and the guards being able to take advantage of that because they knew who was in that position
Early in the game, you thought, hey, maybe attack him directly. But they were so tactical about the way that they exposed this zone. And I think that that's going to carry them well, especially going into the Western Conference finals. Like talk a little bit about their offense. Like what did it look like out there for you to see it? It looks very energetic from TV. But what was it like in real time?
Yeah, a lot of times the way that teams crack zones is that they get perimeter shots to go in. Right. And that was not the case in this game. You were exactly right. The dunker spot was huge for them. And it was the ball just had to move. The ball definitely had energy for them. And they were finding wide open dunks. You know, at one point I was like, how many dunks they have?
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