The Oklahoma City Thunder beat Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets in game 7 to advance to the conference finals, and Dave DuFour, Zena Keita, Es Baraheni, and Andrew Schlecht are here to talk about it. They the Thunder’s disruptive defense, how they figured out Denver’s zone defense, and Aaron Gordon’s gutty performance. Then, the gang looks ahead to the conference finals round of the playoffs and make some predictions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
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.
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