The Oklahoma City Thunder have been the class of the NBA all season. They made easy work of the Minnesota Timberwolves last night to finish the Western Conference Finals in five games, and they now await whichever team emerges from the New York Knicks vs Indiana Pacers series, which the Pacers lead 3-1, the in the Finals.
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OKC cruised to a 30-point win over Anthony Edwards and company in what turned out to be a real blowout. Even though the Wolves made their second consecutive conference finals, that entire series wasn’t really competitive, and OKC hasn’t been challenged much at all outside of the Nuggets putting up a fight in Round 2 with the benefit of two late game buzzer beaters.
Even before last night’s beatdown, the guys of the Club 520 podcast were not happy with what they’d watched, and they let their frustrations air on their most recent episode. They even had a surprising culprit to blame for how lopsided the West turned out to be.
“The West was a disappointment,” host Jeff Teague said. “You know what it was, man? It started with the Lakers. The Lakers let the whole West down.” From an entertainment perspective, there’s no doubt that Teague has a point. The Lakers, the most famous and star-studded team in the league, were completely outplayed in the postseason.
Maybe that means they just weren’t all that good to begin with, but it would’ve been fun to see more of Luka Dončić and LeBron James in the playoffs.
All eyes were on the Lakers as they tried to make that new pairing work, but they went out meekly to the Wolves in the first round in just five games. To make matters worse, they got bullied by Rudy Gobert, who exposed L.A.’s lack of size after trading away AD and failing to find a meaningful replacement when the Mark Williams deal fell through.
Did the Lakers really ruin the playoffs?
Teague and his cohosts went on to make some good points about how although real basketball fans will be excited to watch a Thunder-Pacers Finals, most casual fans won’t care as much as they would have if bigger name players were still alive. “Are they watching it in Atlanta? No,” Teague answered his own question. “I think it’s gonna be like background TV [to most people].”
However, it seems truly illogical to say that fans should care about TV ratings. Those conversations should be saved for anyone working for the NBA, not for basketball watchers at home. The rest of us should just be doing what we can to enjoy the games.
Additionally, blaming the Lakers for the Thunder having a relatively easy run through the West is a stretch, because if L.A. had beaten the Wolves and then the Warriors to reach the conference finals, it’s difficult to imagine a world in which they could have hung around with OKC.
The Lakers did well to win 50 games, but they were one of the most obviously flawed teams in the postseason. LeBron and Luka were given only two months to find their on-court chemistry, and the Lakers as a whole were so defensively deficient that they could have never hoped to win multiple playoff series.
Going against the smothering defense of OKC would have given the Lakers fits. We saw how offensively inept they were against the Wolves, as they failed to crack 100 points in three of their five games.
JJ Redick doesn’t have a single player on his roster capable of slowing SGA down. Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein would have had their way down low, and Alex Caruso, who has been OKC’s secret weapon through three rounds, would have made the Lakers sorry they ever let him go.
Some could point to the Celtics elimination as the loss of a true opponent for OKC. Jayson Tatum’s injury near the end of Game 4 put the final nail in the Celtics’ coffin, but they lost that series long before that. The Knicks just don’t have enough to get to the Finals, and even if they did, they couldn’t hope to give OKC a real test.
The Pacers have been a phenomenal story, and Tyrese Haliburton’s revenge tour has been a sight to behold, but the average person on the street isn’t changing their evening plans to accommodate Thunder-Pacers into their schedule.
Even then, they really should. Instead of framing these Finals as a matchup between small market teams, the NBA should be proudly broadcasting a battle of the top offense in the NBA against the top defense. The Finals should be all about basketball, not about names. The Pacers are a good opponent for the Thunder, and we will definitely be watching.
