Slicing and dicing through OKC’s defense, things were too for Charlotte. Granted, they have one of the more fun offenses in the league. But to completely carve up the league-best defense on its own floor had the entire NBA world shell-shocked. One layer of that was Chet Holmgren’s nonexistent paint protection.<\/p>\n
The Oklahoma City Thunder<\/a> hit rock bottom in their 124-97 loss<\/a> to the Charlotte Hornets<\/a>. It’s easily their worst loss of the season and perhaps in years. A recent 6-6 mediocre stretch has caused some concern about the reigning NBA champion’s mortality.<\/p>\n Holmgren finished with 15 points on 5-of-11 shooting, six rebounds and two assists. He shot 1-of-4 from 3 and went 4-of-6 on free throws.<\/p>\n Besides a few dunks, Holmgren was shut out as a scorer. The Hornets did an excellent job of making him uncomfortable. Even when he had enough space to go for a pull-up jumper, he couldn’t drill them at the efficient clip that’s turned him into a probable first-time All-Star player.<\/p>\n But that’s the least concerning part of what happened. Even with league-best metrics, OKC’s defense has remained inconsistent in the past few weeks. The opposition has made things look too easy on what’s supposed to be the Thunder’s bread and butter. A lack of creating turnovers is one thing. It’s a whole different problem when they can’t stop drives to the basket and leave shooters completely open from deep.<\/p>\n “You have to approach it with the right level of gravity. You can’t just brush it off and wipe the film and say, ‘Onto the next.’ But you also can’t overreact and allow the emotions of losing a game, nobody likes to lose, to pull you in the wrong direction,” Holmgren said. “You have to look at it objectively for what it is. Look at where we can be better. Just look at the game for what it was.”<\/p>\n The rebounding woes also continued for the Thunder. You can definitely sense Isaiah Hartenstein’s absence grow with each game. They were minus-19 in the rebound department as a team. Even when they had awesome first-shot defense, Charlotte would grab a demoralizing offensive board and sink a second-chance bucket.<\/p>\n Holmgren has never been a rebound machine. And without Hartenstein, you’re starting to see that trickle down to the rest of the roster. It’s just another example of a long list that \u2014 despite their record and net rating \u2014 the vibes have seemed off in OKC for a little bit. The boards always tell the truth. To get destroyed the way they did these last two games is a major red flag.<\/p>\n “You can try to attribute it to whatever factors you want. Obviously, Hart is huge for us. Everybody knows he’s a monster on the glass. He’s always been big for us in that department while he’s been with us. I can’t wait to get him back. He’s doing everything he needs to do to take care of himself and play with us,” Holmgren said. “But at the end of the day, it’s less about attributing it to this or that. It’s more about just being better in that area and getting it done. That’s not a marginal number or the ball bounced the wrong way. I just gotta look in the mirror and be better in that area. Us, as a team, we gotta be better in that area.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Slicing and dicing through OKC’s defense, things were too for Charlotte. Granted, they have one of the more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3783],"tags":[7,684,473,618,366,311,948,619,685,947,949,70,85,6,320,626,67,310,475,179,3966,3965,61,628,66,83,312],"class_list":["post-520639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oklahoma-city-thunder","tag-basketball","tag-charlotte","tag-charlotte-hornets","tag-chet","tag-chet-holmgren","tag-city","tag-hartenstein","tag-holmgren","tag-hornets","tag-isaiah","tag-isaiah-hartenstein","tag-national","tag-national-sports","tag-nba","tag-nc","tag-negative","tag-news","tag-oklahoma","tag-oklahoma-city","tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","tag-oklahomacity","tag-oklahomacitythunder","tag-overall","tag-overall-negative","tag-sports","tag-sports-news","tag-thunder"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115849392600973944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}