“1-AND-DONE”

You’ve heard that lots of time in basketball.

Did you ever think you’d hear it in reference to the Oklahoma City Thunder?

The San Antonio Spurs raised the NBA West Conference trophy over the dead body of the Thunder, whom many thought were on the brink of becoming an NBA dynasty.

Pick any word you want to describe what happened in the emotion packed Game 7-in Oklahoma City.  

Shooter beat Superstars.  Frantic.  Manic.  It was basketball theatre at its best this (111-103) San Antonio win.  It capped a series full of mood swings.  You remember games where we had scoring runs of (20-0)..(18-0)…(15-0) twice.  Teams saw 14-16 point leads disappear.

This one was a dandy, the two teams combined for 171-shots in 48-minutes.  Screw the shot clock.

It was a matchup of superstars, Victor Wembenyama-vs-Shai Gilegous-Alexander.

But when it came down to most integral part in the 7th game, was the Super Subs beating the Superstar.

SGA had to carry his team, and he did with (35P).  But it was not just Wemby’s (22P) but rather the (54P) from his subordinates that made the difference.  The boxscores tell the story of what guys named Fox..Champagnie-Harper-Castle-Vassell meant in that win.

Untold, and surely not an excuse, but the truth, OKC not having the explosive Jaylen Williams and Ajay Mitchell on the floor crucified the Thunder.  That’s a combined (29P) per game sitting on the bench in street clothes.

A 14-point early Spurs lead meant nothing because SGA would play a ton of minutes and make some amazing shots to rally the team back twice.

But in the end, he ran out of gas, OKC ran out of players, and the Thunder ran out of time.  The Spurs hit 17-3’s…had 7-in double figures.  Wemby played the final-critical 8-minutes with 5-fouls but the Thunder could not get him out of the game

At the end, the look of sadness from an exhausted MVP.  The celebration and the arrival of the Spurs in Wembenyama’s 2nd season.

And in a sky box above the crowd sat the architect of all this, Greg Popovich, the legendary coach, no longer allowed to be who he used to be, because of complications of a stroke.  He walks with a cane, has lost the use of his left arm.  His speed is somewhat slurred.  And yet his basketball mind is sharp enough to give a speech in practice this past week leading to Game 7.

Winners move on, the Spurs get ready to face the feel good NY Knicks, who are on an (11-0) run in postseason.  The losers, and they really are not, the Thunder go home for the summer.  They are still a great team, and will be back virtually intact next opening night.

But at this hour, in the NBA, it turns out the Thunder are indeed 1-and-Done.

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