The Oklahoma City Thunder beat Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets in game 7 to advance to the conference finals, and Dave DuFour, Zena Keita, Es Baraheni, and Andrew Schlecht are here to talk about it. They the Thunder’s disruptive defense, how they figured out Denver’s zone defense, and Aaron Gordon’s gutty performance. Then, the gang looks ahead to the conference finals round of the playoffs and make some predictions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What were the key moments in Game 7?
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily. Coming up, we had a Super Bowl on Sunday. Andrew Schleck's here to talk about Game 7 from every single angle. Game seven. The two best words in sports. Zena Kata, Espera Henney, Andrew Schlecht, Dave DeFore, NBA Daily, In the House. Andrew still in the Paycom Center Arena. You can hear the balls in the background if you're just listening.
Andrew, what a performance from the Oklahoma City Thunder. Wow.
Yeah, defensively, this was their best game that they've played. They held the Nuggets to 93 total points, 39% from the field, and they really limited everything.
I mean, the Thunder knew heading into this game that Aaron Gordon was going to be limited, and obviously he's great for their defense, but offensively, there wasn't a whole lot going outside of Nikola Jokic, and he didn't even have a great game. And a lot of that was the Thunder filled every single gap there was.
They basically played eight guys in this one with their starting lineup, plus Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, Cason Wallace. And they had this revolving door of players. It was like they weren't playing like, hey, here's this lineup, here's that lineup. It was just a revolving door of players. And they're like, we're going to play five out. We're going to play all guards together. for two minutes.
We're going to play super big for two minutes. They gave them every single look, and I think the guys to really look at that had the intensity that you'd want, and this is not anything new, but it's Cason Wallace and Alex Caruso. Those two brought it off the bench. Caruso was the primary defender for Jokic for large charges of this one. Yeah. I've got Teddy Tumbleson here in the background.
Matt Tumbleson's son listening in live. I love it. It's just great. Thunder PR extraordinaire. Yeah, I just thought their defensive activity was just different. It was special. It was that's probably the best defensive game I've seen them play. And we're talking about one of the best defensive teams ever to play. And we saw great stretches for them all year. That was the best.
And they said that they came into this with a sense of urgency. It was like, where was that sense of urgency in game six? But it was definitely here in game seven. And that was the difference maker. Yes, they made shots. They had 64 points in the paint, which was unbelievable. But it all started on the defensive end where the Nuggets had no answers.
It was basically like Jokic just kind of just, I'm going to have to throw myself into these guys so that I can get free throws. And that's about the only thing we have cooking here.
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Chapter 2: How did the Thunder's defense perform against the Nuggets?
And it's, you know, he is so impressive. You know what we say in basketball circles, get that dog in him. I mean, that's the only way you can do it. I mean, like, it was comical to watch the size difference between the two of them, and it was one-on-one.
And Jokic, they just, I mean, of course they send the help, but it's not often that they guard Jokic one-on-one with a guy who's given up that much size. And it is totally common for guards to get that much leeway against the big inside. I do think that we should take a minute to talk about Aaron Gordon, even though, you know, the Nuggets lost this game. That's a...
heroic yeah performance from a guy who clearly could like he could barely run absolutely i mean yeah like it looked bad on tv i imagine watching him there and every it looked like every single time he had to stop after doing something he was like grabbing at that leg he still like was able to out rebound the thunder early on i mean basically one of the few guys that it felt like was uh playing up to his abilities in the game at least um you know for for the nuggets
Yeah, it was one of the stranger things before the game, because you hear these reports that he has this grade two hamstring strain, and you automatically think he's not going to play. There's no way this guy's playing through this. That's not going to happen. And then we hear David Adelman talk before the game, say, well, he's going to warm up and try to give it a go. Yeah. So I'm like... What?
And so I come out here and I plant myself in one of these chairs over here and I'm like, I'm waiting until Aaron Gordon comes out here and I'm going to watch his entire warm up to see like what he looks like and like to see like, is he actually going to give it a go? And he came out and he pretty much did his entire routine that he normally does pregame.
Sans, he always does this explosive leap to dunk it at the end of his routine, and clearly did not do that, which was not surprising. But I think it's funny because I talked to a ton of people afterwards. I was like, what do you think? What did you think after watching that? And it was like 50-50, like, oh, there's no way he's going. All he's doing is taking jumpers.
He's walking from jump shot to jump shot. There's no way he's playing. And there's other people that are like, oh, he's absolutely playing. And I think a lot of the choice... was probably his and this one. Yeah, of course.
Because I think most organizations at this point would probably be like, there ain't no way you're playing with that kind of injury because you may cost yourself all of next season with something like that. And so... Obviously, this is a guy who's part of a champion, all of that. He's been, I would say, the most clutch player in these playoffs so far. He's now eliminated, but he had a crazy run.
His second best nugget player this postseason, for sure.
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