The Thunder held two-thirds of their team out of the game tonight, and their skeleton crew of Jaylin Williams and four bench players, along with three two-way players made the Spurs work for a win. Maybe it\u2019s excusable to let your focus slip a little when you\u2019re not facing the other team\u2019s best players, but it was frustrating to watch as the Spurs just tried to coast to a win and gave the Thunder skeleton crew hope kept them in the game late. The lackadaisical play of the Silver and Black let the end of the Thunder bench play like contenders.<\/p>\n
Instead of playing team ball, there was way too much one on one offense, and slow rotations on defense. The Spurs got a great effort from Keldon Johnson tonight, but most of the rest of the team was embarrassed by the Thunder reserves. De\u2019Aaron Fox made some key plays down the stretch as the Spurs outlasted the Thunder 116-106. The strategy of sitting almost the entire Thunder team felt like a psyop on the Spurs, and given how hard the Spurs had to play to eke out a win, it seems like it worked.<\/p>\n
Despite this win being a little on the disappointing side, it was a good thing for them as they solidified their second spot in the west as they head to Dallas for a game tom0rrow against the Mavericks. They also secured their 34th win of the year, which is the same number of wins the team scored in the entire 2024-2025 season, with 32 games left in the season.<\/p>\n
Tonight is the first game of a back-to-back for the Silver and Black as they travel to Dallas for a matchup against the Mavericks, and their super rookie Cooper Flagg in the first game of a home and home series, which will wrap up on Friday in San Antonio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Thunder held two-thirds of their team out of the game tonight, and their skeleton crew of Jaylin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3783],"tags":[7,6,310,475,179,3966,3965,52387,312],"class_list":{"0":"post-584058","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oklahoma-city-thunder","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-nba","10":"tag-oklahoma","11":"tag-oklahoma-city","12":"tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","13":"tag-oklahomacity","14":"tag-oklahomacitythunder","15":"tag-spurs-game-recaps","16":"tag-thunder"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116018177017811075","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584058","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=584058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}