As Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker walked off the court at halftime on Sunday, he threw a towel to the ground in disgust. At the end of the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, he wasn’t feeling much better about his team’s performance.
The Thunder lost to the Suns by a score of 123-120 on Sunday, but an 18-point fourth-quarter deficit was cut to four before Phoenix managed to secure the game and hand Oklahoma City the loss.
Oklahoma City went on a 16-5 run late in the fourth quarter to claw its way back into the game. It looked like the Thunder could get even closer: Booker had been called for an offensive foul and then a technical for arguing. OKC forced Chris Paul into a turner with heavy trap defense. Lu Dort was called for a foul on a 3-point attempt.
But the Dort foul call was overturned, Booker escaped trap defense — and maybe escaped with his foot on the out-of-bounds line — and the Suns iced the game at the free throw line.
As mad as Daigneault was about the missed out-of-bounds call on Booker, he was practically giddy in the postgame press conference.
“I really like this team,” he said about his own squad with a smile and little laugh. “That was big-time.”
It started with the Thunder’s comeback effort. They trailed by 12 with two minutes to play.
“The situational awareness in those parts of the game, those situational moments of the game — when you foul, when you trap and how to play on offense, quite frankly,” Daigneault said.
“When you’re down 10, there’s a tendency sometimes for guys to just go crazy on offense because they think they have to score 10 on one possession.”
Instead of firing 3s, the Thunder got three dunks in a row, the final of which was an and-one for Isaiah Roby.
After this came the offensive foul on Booker and technical foul. Then, after Roby missed a 3, Paul grabbed the rebound and started to take the ball upcourt.
Oklahoma City knows firsthand how sure-handed Paul is with the basketball and how dominant he is in clutch moments.
But they trapped well and forced a turnover. It was a situation the Thunder had reviewed the day before, guard Kenrich Williams said.
“Yesterday we watched a lot of game situations from throughout the year and from our team and from different teams around the league, and that’s one of the things we went over the day before,” Williams said.
“It’s good to see stuff like that translate. It shows we’re locked in with the game plan.”
Daigneault talked about that play as well. In general, the fact that the team showed lessons learned from reviewing areas on both sides of the ball was a major positive for the coach.
“For them to carry it over in a pressure situation like that when the stakes are high … for them to do that with the level of awareness that they did was high, high level,” he said. “That was what was most impressive, more the mental than the physical.”
Then there was the fact that the Thunder did this less than 24 hours after losing a game by 57 points.
“These guys were awesome tonight on a number of levels,” Daigneault said. “Tonight was a test of our 0-0 mindset with how we played last night, and it thought everybody came ready to play. Learned the lesson, but then moved on and got ourselves into the competition.”
In the end, this is probably an ideal finish for both teams.
The Suns have regained first place in the Western Conference, but they also had a good reminder of what happens when they don’t take teams seriously.
Incredibly enough, the Suns are better against teams with a .500 record or better (25-8) than they are against teams below (21-10).
They needed this reminder. They got it. But they still got the win, their first in Oklahoma City since 2010.
The Thunder, meanwhile, turned the page on perhaps the worst loss in franchise history with a performance that earned rave reviews from Daigneault, yet they didn’t harm their lottery odds. Oklahoma City moves back into sole possession of the fifth-worst record in the league, half a game worse than the Cleveland Cavaliers and half a game better than the Orlando Magic.
It’s a game the Thunder can take pride in, even though they suffered another loss.
“There was a lot of growth and progress tonight, we should be really, really happy,” Daigneault said.
This post originally appeared on OKCThunderWire. Follow us on Facebook!
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