You’ve heard this before: Oklahoma City Thunder guard Lu Dort had a stellar night defensively. In a question posed to head coach Mark Daigneault, the reporter mentioned that this topic might be getting repetitive in postgame interviews. Daigneault isn’t getting tired of it.
“It’s not a broken record in that it’s really hard to do every night. It’s hard to play well every night, it’s hard to compete every night as it is, and then Murray is a great player,” Daigneault said.
“You’re at the bottom of the mountain every night as a team and also when you’re guarding guys like that. The will that he has to be at the bottom of the mountain against the best players on the other team, and to compete the way he does … it’s really a tone-setter for us.”
But it wasn’t just Dort’s defensive performance against Murray, who scored just five points on 2-for-10 shooting and didn’t hit a single 3, that makes this game stand out.
Dort … is looking like a legitimate two-way player? Are we officially at the point of the season in which we can say he’s a 3-and-D wing, not just a defender?
Dort had a team-high 20 points, second-most in the game behind only Nikola Jokic’s 27, and shot 8-for-11 from the field. He made three 3s, extending his team lead in that category.
If someone had told you before tipoff that the Nuggets would win by 18 and told you to guess which player between Murray or Dort scored 20 and which scored five, it would feel like an easy guess.
But that wasn’t the case on Tuesday, with Dort outplaying Murray on both ends of the court.
However, that does bring us to the actual score, the 119-101 beating Oklahoma City took at the hands of the Nuggets. There’s no more optimism in this piece. There’s no sugarcoating it: This wasn’t a close game.
The Thunder played well through about a quarter and a half, but a 12-3 run by the Nuggets late in the second quarter put them ahead by double-digits going into halftime. In the third, Denver outscored Oklahoma City by 10 more points, which gave the Nuggets a 23-point lead heading into the final frame. From there, it was garbage time.
“Tonight they were the better team. Offensively and defensively,” said guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who finished with 14 points on 5-for-11 shooting. “We didn’t put enough pressure on them on both ends of the floor to get a W. That’s just what it came down to.”
The Thunder’s biggest issues were rebounding and turnovers. The Nuggets had 17 more boards than the Thunder and scored 28 points off 19 OKC turnovers.
The blowouts are starting to pile up for the Thunder.
That three-game win streak feels like a long time ago after this past week. After losing a relatively close game to the San Antonio Spurs, the Thunder got crushed by the Los Angeles Lakers. They then fell behind by 22 points to the Chicago Bulls before somehow pulling out a victory.
The Nuggets are not the Bulls. You fall behind Denver by 20 points, you’re probably not catching up.
It’s too soon to say the magic is over, but the Thunder haven’t had a full strong game since the win over the Brooklyn Nets. The Lakers loss as an isolated incident would be no issue, given that Los Angeles is the defending champion and even better than last season. But having it after the double-digit loss to the Spurs, following it with the first three quarters against the Bulls and then getting beaten down by a Nuggets team that entered the night 6-7, there have been a concerning number of uncompetitive quarters, halves and games over this eight-day period.
It’s not going to get easier over the next week. With two games against the Los Angeles Clippers, one against the Portland Trail Blazers and one against the Phoenix Suns on this road trip, there isn’t a game against a non-playoff contender on the horizon. Oklahoma City will have to step up and, to use one of Daigneault’s favorite clichés, play the full 48 minutes like a winning team.
If they can’t, the Western Conference playoff and play-in spots may fall out of reach quicker than anticipated.