The Thunder slipped back into the sixth seed in the Western Conference on Tuesday night with a loss to the shorthanded Warriors, leaving themselves in somewhat perilous position heading into the final three games of the season. Oklahoma City holds just a half-game lead over the Timberwolves in seventh and a one-game lead over the Pelicans in eighth.
Falling into either one of those spots would mean facing either the Warriors or the Rockets in the first round, and facing the very real possibility of an early exit from the postseason. No matter who they face, whether it’s Golden State, Houston, Portland, or anyone else, the Thunder desperately need their star acquisitions this summer to find their shooting form.
Carmelo Anthony has struggled all season with efficiency, going through fits and starts of appearing to “figure it out” when it comes to his role before regressing once again. Since the All-Star break, ‘Melo is averaging 13.6 points per game with a 37.3/38.4/68.0 shooting split. What’s odd is that his three-point percentage is higher than his season average, but his field goal and free throw percentages have cratered.
More concerning for the Thunder and their playoff prospects is the slump Paul George has found himself in since All-Star. George is averaging 19.1 points per game and has seen his shooting splits plummet to 37.1/28.9/86.1. Considering his pre-All-Star break percentages were 44.9/43.3/80.1, it’s a fairly astonishing drop off. On Tuesday night, George was brutally honest with the assembled media about his shooting woes following a 5-of-19 performance in the Thunder’s loss against the Warriors.
Paul George says there’s something mechanically wrong with his shot: “I don’t know that it is. It just feels funny. Shooting the ball feels funny.” pic.twitter.com/qLJAi7dpKA
— Fred Katz (@FredKatz) April 4, 2018
“I’ve got to figure out something mechanical in my shot,” George said. “I’ve had struggles throughout the season and my career shooting. It’s all just being able…not making shots. I don’t know what it is. It just feels funny. Shooting the ball feels funny. So I’m working with our trainers to try and figure it out. But I don’t feel myself shooting the ball. … It’s just my shooting period. I don’t know what’s stiff, what’s tight. Something’s going on with my shooting.”
It’s not the most encouraging thing to hear out of a star player a week and a half before the playoffs are going to begin, but hopefully for the Thunder and George moving forward he can pinpoint that issue and make a fix quickly. With George and Anthony struggling to shoot the ball, the workload is once again falling on Russell Westbrook to try and carry the offensive load down the stretch, which as we learned last postseason is a system that has a ceiling to how far it can take a team.
That’s not a knock on Westbrook, but simply the way of the modern NBA where defenses can force a team to lean on someone other than their primary star in the postseason. It’s why every title team in recent years has had multiple stars or a system predicated on ball movement like the Spurs (and, you know, they also had some great players). The Thunder hoped they had remedied that problem by adding George and Anthony, but barring a dramatic change from those two come playoff time, it might be more of the same in Oklahoma City.
