SAN ANTONIO (AP) – The Oklahoma City Thunder were still embarrassed, shocked, frustrated and angry the morning after a horrendous loss to the San Antonio Spurs in their series opener.
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They took a defensive ax to Oklahoma City’s game plan, then used the swift, clean strokes of an offensive scalpel to slice apart what was supposed to be worthy challenger at the other end.
Aldridge shot 18 for 23 from the field, with almost half his jumpers going uncontested as Oklahoma City failed to switch. Tony Parker is dishing 6.2 assists and Tim Duncan is grabbing 5.4 rebounds.
“Danny’s our starting two-guard”, said San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich. “The ball went in the basket a lot – not trying to be flippant, but that’s what happened”.
Oklahoma City Serge Ibaka’s 19 points on 8-of-15 shooting. The Spurs’ tandem held KD and Russ to a combined 30 points on 11-of-34 shooting.
“Shots were falling for me and my team-mates were looking for me”, forward Aldridge said.
I’m again taking the Thunder and the points. We already knew what to expect. San Antonio won 124-92.
Manu’s lone bucket to set the franchise mark for highest scoring postseason quarter.
Kawhi Leonard added 25 points, five rebounds and five assists in 22 minutes for San Antonio. The Thunder on the other hand had to grind it out against the Dallas Mavericks in a highly physical series, winning it 4-1.
The Thunder placed third behind San Antonio and Golden State and trailed those two teams by 5.7 points per 100.
Durant didn’t fare much better with Green guarding him, connecting on just 3 of 7 attempts. “So it’s a credit to him, even though his shots didn’t fall during the season the way he wanted them to, he still played the game to the best of his ability and improved as a player”. The Spurs starters sat out the entire fourth quarter.
The Spurs cooled off to shoot a mere 11-of-20 in the period and committed four turnovers, but they still out-scored the Thunder 30-20 and looked like the superior team by some distance.
Kawhi Leonard and Lamarcus Aldridge absolutely dominated.
Cameron Payne, who played more minutes last night than he did in the first round, was the first of the two given a Friendly Bounce.
The Oklahoma City Thunder ‘s big man made some nice contributions on the glass over his time on the court, marking his second consecutive postseason game with 10 boards. No news of retirement after this season has been reported, but it figures if this team wins another title, he could ride out of town knowing there is nothing more he could have done in the game. It was so loud bro, it was just really hard for us to get guards in position to do the coverage because they just couldn’t hear us.
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“And we have to be more disciplined on offence”. San Antonio had every area of the floor covered offensively – they got it going from behind the 3-point line and on transition and they were deadly in non-paint, two-point shooting. “I think what they did is they put us in some tough situations on the defensive end”. Naturally, Game 1 ended up as the most overwhelming blowout of the playoffs so far.
