Oklahoma City Thunder: The Thrill of Victory
When the Oklahoma City Thunder vs. San Antonio Spurs schedule was released, I immediately panicked. “THREE DAYS OFF BETWEEN GAME TWO AND THREE?!?!?!” As a fan, the worst part of the non-game moments is the wait. If your team loses, you want them to play the next day so you can erase that loss from your memory (unless you blow a 20-point lead to the Clippers and the have to play Golden State the next night. Then you just want the world to end). If you team wins, you want to bask in that glory for a couple of days before the inevitable loss happens down the road.
So when I saw that Game 2 was Monday and Game 3 was Friday, I got scared. The Spurs had only lost one game at home during the entire season, and that was to potentially the best team in history. Could Oklahoma City, a team that has failed to win so many big games throughout the year, really get a split? It didn’t seem plausible. I immediately thought about the possibility of being down 0-2 and then having three days to replay the two losses in my head, anxiously waiting for Game 3 and wondering if the team had any chance to win the series.
After Game 1, all the nightmares became a reality. No focus, no effort, no sense of urgency, no offense, no defense. Just an outright embarrassing performance by a team in a big game. I picked the Spurs to win in six. After Game 1, I wasn’t sure how San Antonio would lose. As pessimistic as I was about the series following the first game, I was happy that there was only a one-day break between games. After all, as bad as things were in Game 1, could they really be any worse in Game 2?
It turns out, it was almost worse. The Thunder nearly blew Game 2 the same way they’ve blown games all year. Poor execution in the fourth-quarter, mental errors in the final minute, and a guy getting hot on the other team. I, and I know that I wasn’t alone, was just waiting for the team to collapse. Somehow, they didn’t. They tried really hard. But they didn’t. They managed to hang on after one of the wildest finishing sequences in NBA history and win a game in San Antonio to split the series at one.
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DO YOU KNOW HOW EXCITED I AM?!?!?! I’M SO THUNDERED UP RIGHT NOW! I DIDN’T SLEEP FOR TWO HOURS AFTER THE GAME! I’M RUNNING ON NOTHING BUT RUSSELL WESTBROOK MOUNTAIN DEW! WE GOT THIS!
It’s funny how our perception as fans change after one game. Had the Thunder blown the lead, and they really tried to do just that, then we’d be taking these three days to write the season eulogy and wonder why Kevin Durant would want to stay on the team. But they held on, and now we’re optimistic. “Aldridge won’t continue to shoot that well and if he’s not scoring, who else can they rely on?” “They have no answer for Westbrook.” “Durant has been aggressive and he’s unstoppable when he’s aggressive.” “Donovan has finally realized that Kyle Singler and Randy Foye are useless.” Suddenly we’re spending these three days thinking about how the team might win this series, how they’ve possibly turned the corner and corrected their fourth quarter issues, and Dion Waiters being a genius.
There’s a thin line between winning and losing on the court (Manu Ginobili tried crossing it, Waiters pushed him back) and that line exists for fans as well. A loss is crippling. It keeps you up at night as you wonder what went wrong and replay all the mistake in your head, it makes you want to punch walls, it leads to you furiously talking with your best friend and coming up with stupid trades like Westbrook for Ty Lawson and Kenneth Faried, it upsets you even more the next day when all your friends talk about it nonchalantly because they don’t care who won or lost, and it angers your girlfriend because she just can’t understand why you take sports so serious.
A win is euphoric. It pumps up your adrenaline to the point where you can’t sleep even though you have to be at work in six hours, it leads to you screaming in your room and waking the neighbors before walking outside to talk with your best friend so you can wake the entire neighborhood, it puts a giant smile face the next day as your friends talk about the game with you, and it confuses your girlfriend because she still can’t understand why you take sports so serious.
Enjoy these next couple of days, Thunder fans, because it’s possible that we may not have this feeling again.