Why Every Basketball Fan Should Care About This Season’s Oklahoma City Thunder

Serge Ibaka, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant
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The 2015-16 NBA Season starts soon, preseason hoops are in full swing, and playoff prognostications have begun in earnest. Being that season previews can get bogged down by team-specific minutiae, and we cover every basketball team, we’re providing our readers reasons why you should care about all 30 teams in the Association.


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This is almost too easy. Fans inside and outside of Oklahoma City are going to tune into Thunder games. They’re going to marvel at a rejuvenated Kevin Durant and a Russell Westbrook focused in a Billy Donovan attack that might even see No. 0 in the post.

Because it’s so simple to dangle the carrot that is OKC’s 1-2 offensive punch, we’re going to discuss their summer free agent signee and next summer’s most anticipated unrestricted free agent since LeBron in 2010.

But first, let’s talk about the former Jazz big man who got a four-year, $70 million offer from the ravaged corpse of the Blazers, only to see the team that traded for him at the deadline match the offer.

Some astutely pointed out that with KD possibly leaving next summer, matching the offer — especially with the cap increasing — for Kanter was a form of appeasement. Kanter is the shiny bauble to distract Durant from all the various moves other summer-time suitors might make. Except, despite a soft touch around the rim and some very real pick-and-roll chemistry with Russ after the two played together — sans KD — last year, Kanter is such a terrible defender, right now he’s going to backup Steven Adams at the five. That’s a four-year, $70 million backup center in 2015. While his deal isn’t a significant percentage of the 2017 cap or over the ensuing years, his super-sub status is a testament to just how badly he defends.

Enes Kanter might be the worst defender in the league

Enes Kanter, Karl-Anthony Towns
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During Kanter’s 28 games with the Thunder in the second half of last season, the Thunder had a defensive rating (points allowed per 100 possessions) of 109.9 when Enes was flopping around the court. That would have been the worst in the league (Minney was at the bottom at 109.6 and the second worst was the Lakers at 108.0). But when Kanter was on the bench, that rating dropped to 102.9, almost dead for an NBA team last year.

You could say that the absence of Serge Ibaka hurt Kanter’s numbers, like we initially did when we looked at them, but during the nine games and 238 minutes Ibaka and Kanter shared the court last year, the Thunder’s defensive rating was still the second-worst in the NBA (109.2). Simple on/off numbers show us that, but there’s plenty more.

On/off numbers are useful, but they hardly paint the entire picture. Fortunately, ESPN has created real plus-minus, that takes into account a player’s teammates as part of the algorithm and it’s proven to be a more effective means of measuring on-court impact. That’s too bad for Kanter, who was ranked dead last in defensive real plus minus among the 62 centers who qualified last year. Last. Dead last.

You call that defense?
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You call that defense?

That’s not the end of it, unfortunately. (This is when a large segment of Salt Lake City nod’s their head and blows an imaginary kiss to the Stifle Tower.) According to the NBA’s SportVu tracking data, opponents had the second-highest field goal percentage in the NBA against Kanter at the rim (among players who appeared in at least 20 games and defended at least five shots at the rim per game). No. 1 on that list was Adreian Payne, a rookie, and he was right at the cutoff for shots at the rim. If Kanter was perfectly positioned to defend the iron, you — dear reader — could probably still score on him.

Perhaps he’s gotten a little bit better during preseason, when the stakes are lower and he can focus on the right positioning and effort on that end. Nope. In 46 preseason possessions, Synergy has him listed in the 19th percentile for defense, which falls well “below average.”

Denver’s fun French center, Joffrey Lauvergne, has been a high-efficiency scorer for the Nuggets this preseason, but should he abuse Kanter this badly with a simple shot fake before the easy dunk?

No, he shouldn’t. We get why the Thunder wanted to match Portland’s offer sheet for Kanter in July, but we think Portland lucked out when OKC matched. Now it’ll be on Billy Donovan to stagger Kanter’s minutes or risk turning their backline into a colander camouflaged as defense.

The specter of Kevin Durant (again)

Kevin Durant is the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Russell Westbrook might be more exciting, Serge Ibaka is immensely valuable, and Nick Collison is his team’s eldest statesman. But the Thunder have literally never known an existence without the presence of basketball’s most lethal scorer – not to mention all of the hope, security, and imminent success that accompanies him.

Oklahoma City might not have to learn what that would be like, either. Durant says he’d “love” to have his jersey retired by the Thunder, and has always embraced the small town atmosphere that’s a byproduct of the franchise’s place on a map that many other megastars wouldn’t.

Kevin Durant
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Durant loves Oklahoma City. That’s obvious. But it doesn’t mean the 27-year-old will re-sign with the Thunder during his foray into unrestricted free agency next summer, or even that his obvious affinity for a sense of community will lead him back home to the Washington Wizards. The Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks always loom. Word from the Bay is the champion Golden State Warriors have lofty ambitions of teaming Durant with Stephen Curry and company, and Pat Riley’s Miami Heat always have a seat at the high-stakes free agency poker table.

Almost anything could happen when Durant finally hits the open market. But there’s certainly a case to be made that his best chance to win a championship over the long haul will be in Oklahoma City, and the team recently fortified it with a pair of franchise-altering decisions: Replacing Scott Brooks with Billy Donovan and rocketing past the luxury tax line to match the Portland Trail Blazers’ offer sheet to Enes Kanter.

Those choices were met with disparate degrees of skepticism – certainly more for the latter than the former. Kanter is a sieve defensively, and it remains to be seen how he’ll perform and react to playing in lineups with a pair of ball-dominant players. Donovan has already made the keen judgement of bringing Kanter off the bench in his team’s exhibition games, an encouraging sign of things to come during his first season on the NBA sidelines. There’s certainly reason to believe the former University of Florida coach will thrive in 2015-16; Durant and Westbrook seem to be anticipating it based on early impressions of the Thunder’s new offense, too. But every unknown is a variable that could potentially affect what transpires next summer; anyone saying otherwise is fooling themselves.

By shaking things up on the bench and finally digging deeper into its pockets, though, Oklahoma City has shown Durant it will do what’s necessary to help him win a championship. Combined with added financial incentive and the basic human sense of discomfort gleaned from any change, will that aggression be enough to keep him in the bible belt?

There’s no way to know for now. What’s absolutely obvious, though, is that Durant’s impending decision will shape the Thunder one way or another just as much as his mere presence has since the team’s inception.

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