What’s happened since is that the Thunder have started to figure things out. Perhaps not coincidentally that’s happened as Steven Adams has been playing the best basketball of his season so far, looking as healthy as he has to date and living it up in the box scores as a result. Even his free throws have come good!
We’re now fully three quarters through the season and we’re at that stage where teams begin to fall into two distinct categories: playing for this year and playing for next year.
Three games all on Friday and with no more bye weeks we’re now hitting that beautiful long sprint towards the playoffs. Just gotta survive the old turkey gags first from all the telly coverages. Be prepared to see tacky promos from players and their families promoted good old fashioned American Values.
Poor Mitch.
We’re now fourteen games into the NBA season for the Oklahoma City Thunder and eleven games into Steven Adams’ own campaign. That’s eleven games of evidence as to what’s going on and we’re still none the wiser.
All this weirdness I’ve been writing about, which has had the effect of eroding away the last vestiges of what this club used to stand for, has been in order to create an immediately successful basketball team. So, like, what happens now if this goes the wrong way and they tumble into irrelevance with half a season still to go?
Nah but seriously what a week. There was late drama basically across the board... eleven of the thirteen games finished within eight points and five of those were two or three point games. The drama. The chaos. The absolute carnage upon my picks.
The early days of the new NBA season were a false start for Steven Adams. Coming off the supreme touch and control he seemed to have in preseason, building up some lofty expectations, he was a shadow of himself across the first week or so as a left knee contusion clearly affected his ability to play to his capacity.
One New York quarterback saw ghosts. The other threw an idiotic interception late in the first half after a black cat had run into the endzone a few minutes earlier. The Giants were up 9-3 when the cat turned up and they went on to lose 37-18.
Steven Adams has always done the little things that help a guy like Russell Westbrook thrive. Now he has to do the thriving, which is a very exciting prospect – and one we got a delicious taste of in preseason when he was one of the most effective dudes out there across the whole NBA.
George Kittle knows what the people want. George Kittle knows what they paid good money to see.
Ah the Chargers. The Chargers who have made a precise science out of losing games they should win. I’ve seen many shockers in the past from this lot. Missed field goals, shocking interceptions, and the like. But nothing that quite compares to what they did against the Titans.
If the Wellington Phoenix get to be a work in progress, accepting their two opening defeats with encouragement because of the unique rebuilding situation they find themselves in, then the NZ Breakers get to have the same treatment too because... I mean, just look at it all.
People keep trying to talk up an MVP race with various candidates and I have to keep pointing out that there is only one candidate and it’s Russell Wilson. He’s far and away the most important and the best performing player in 2019. This is the year we’ll look back on after his career as the highlight. Like Brady in 2007 or Rodgers in 2011.
All you need to know about Christian McCaffrey is that at the rate he’s going, he’s on pace to record 2771 yards from scrimmage with 22 total touchdowns in 2019. The all-time record for yards from scrimmage in a season is 2509 yards (Chris Johnson in 2009). That’s incredible.
The state of the Oklahoma City Thunder has changed drastically over the last few months but all the words that are spoken and all the deals that get made and all the hypotheticals… nothing quite hits home like that first opportunity to see the team together in uniform ahead of a new season.
Here we are at the quarter stage of the season already and still absolutely nothing makes sense. Except for the Patriots, unfortunately. But apart from them we’ve got backup quarterbacks outplaying their starters, we’ve got Green Bay winning games with Aaron Rodgers playing within himself…
Remember like two weeks ago when Corey Webster wanted to take up that offer to play in Turkey and the Breakers didn’t wanna let him go because as a local player of the skill level that Webby is it was just impossible to replace him this close to the start of the season? Yeah well that problem doesn’t exist for import players.
Well… I s’pose I’d better talk about Daniel Jones now, hadn’t I? The G-Men rookie staring down a 28-10 deficit on the road with his star running back on crutches on the sideline and the bloody guy only goes and leads his team back to win 32-31.
We do know one thing for sure and that’s that with the plethora of draft picks that they acquired in those two trades – which could see them with multiple first round picks for the next five years if things break right – this is a team that is ready to embrace a rebuild. The cupboard is stocked full.