How The Thunder Have Flipped The Script, And The Series, On The Spurs

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

The San Antonio Spurs are a basketball machine. They are a five-man symphony of ball and player movement led by Kawhi Leonard, a cyborg assassin who shuts down whatever opponent is needed and scores only as many points as are necessary. The ruthless efficiency of their attack is beautiful and terrifying to behold. Yeah yeah yeah, you know how this goes.

The Oklahoma City Thunder, for their part, are more of a garage band, led by an extremely talented duo, who write some catchy-ass rhythms when they're not trying to club each other over the head with empty whiskey bottles. That combustibility is readily apparent during timeouts—players are yelling at each other, players are yelling at the coach, Russell Westbrook is visibly vibrating in kind of an alarming way. They may have two of the best players on Earth in Westbrook and Kevin Durant, but even that has never assured the Thunder of victory against the very best playoff competition. They're a puzzle, and no coach has fully solved them yet.

And yet these Thunder are now up 3-2, with a chance to close out the Spurs in Oklahoma City. Tuesday's 95-91 victory was the Thunder's second consecutive win in San Antonio, a minor miracle given the fact that the Spurs went 40-1 at home in the regular season. How the hell are they pulling this off?

Imagine yourself waking up one day and committing to become a better person in every possible way. You hit the gym, give up soda and Doritos, call your parents more often, do volunteer work, finally crack open that Rosetta Stone and start learning Spanish. Now try to imagine an entire basketball team suddenly making a similar commitment to improve every weakness all at once. Then try to imagine it actually working.

That's the Thunder after getting pantsed embarrassingly in Game 1 of this series. They're winning by doing everything they failed to do during the regular season, and they're doing it against one of the most dominant regular-season teams in league history.

As the playoffs dawned, it was readily apparent that the Thunder had a few very serious flaws, of the sort that are unbecoming of a title contender. Their defense was pedestrian, ranking 12th in the league in opponent points per 100 possessions. They had a gaping hole at shooting guard—starter Andre Roberson was needed on D, but was a total non-factor as a scorer, and his backups were even more flawed. And then there was this:

Why the Thunder aren't contenders in one graphic. That's nauseating. — Josh Eberley (@JoshEberley)April 3, 2016

So Oklahoma City wasn't particularly good at stopping opponents, often played 4-on-5, and completely fell apart in fourth quarters, losing a league-high 13 games in which it entered with a lead. Okey dokey, so just stop doing those things. Simple, right?

Oklahoma City has managed to make it all look a lot less impossible than it is. Let's begin with the defense. The Thunder have pulled a shocking 180 from Game 1, when they fouled Spurs players behind the three-point line four times in the first half and generally responded to simple pick-and-roll action as if it was some sort of newfangled sorcery. Over the last four games, the Thunder have held San Antonio to an average of 99.2 points per 100 possessions, far better than their 103.0 regular-season mark.

A big part of this turnaround is Oklahoma City finally leveraging the length on its roster—as long as the Thunder play hard, disciplined D, it will difficult for the Spurs' older guards to get into the paint. The Thunder have also forced LaMarcus Aldridge into taking tough shots—the big man is shooting 36.7 percent over his last three games on an average of just over 21 attempts—and as devastating as Aldridge can be when his midrange jumper is on, he can also shoot his team out of the game if he's gone cold.

That uptick in defensive quality hasn't only come from the usual suspects. Coach Billy Donovan has gone with a surprising lineup to close out each of the last two games, teaming the core trio of Durant, Westbrook, and Steven Adams with Dion Waiters and Enes Kanter, two staples of NBA Twitter scorn. Waiters, an inveterate and truly avant-garde chucker, has put in enough effort on defense to justify playing him over Roberson, which is a good thing considering Waiters is shooting 48.5 percent for the series and 44.4 percent from beyond the arc. Yes, Dion Waiters is really doing this.

Kanter was one of the league's premier sixth men by statistical standards in 2015-16, at least in terms of points and rebounds, but his defensive effort usually sits somewhere between "abominable" and "shameful." He hasn't been great on that end in this series—the Spurs took full advantage of him in the second quarter of Game 5, although they failed to attack him as aggressively after that—but he has been juuuuusssssst passable enough for Donovan to make full use of his rebounding talents alongside Adams.

And boy, did this ever work down the stretch on Tuesday. San Antonio didn't grab a single defensive rebound over the game's final six minutes. Kanter, Adams, and Westbrook swooped in to grab every Thunder miss, and the oversized Thunder frontcourt pummeled San Antonio into submission.

The Thunder were +15 with Steven Adams and Enes Kanter sharing the floor. Offensive rebounding %: 61.5
Defensive rebounding %: 84.2

— Dan Feldman (@DanFeldmanNBA)May 11, 2016

Add all that up—improved defense, massive rebounding advantage, unexpected contributors on both ends—and it's no wonder the Thunder have outscored San Antonio by an average of 6.2 points in the fourth quarter this series. They don't necessarily have to rely on Westbrook and Durant outscoring opponents by themselves, although that is of course a nice fallback to have. And even when they miss, someone is there to clean up the mess.

Still, this is no time for the Thunder to get cocky. The Spurs can make adjustments, and doubtless will do so. It would be surprising if they didn't go at Kanter more regularly with pick-and-rolls when he's in the game, if only to get him off the court and negate OKC's massive rebounding advantage. San Antonio also needs Aldridge to get hot again; the balance of power in the series could shift dramatically if he does. Still, the Thunder have already shown a shocking ability to elevate their play under pressure, and that's helped them draw within one win of the Western Conference Finals. For Oklahoma City, it turns out success really is as simple, and as miraculous, as replacing all the things that don't work with things that do.