Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

The NBA has fined Dallas Mavericks forward Shawn Marion for his criticism of the referees from Friday night’s game between the Mavs and Oklahoma City Thunder.

The Thunder beat the Mavericks 117-114 in overtime in that game while Kevin Durant scored a career-high 52 points that included 21 trips to the free throw line.

“It’s hard to beat anybody when you’re playing five-on-eight,” Marion told reporters. “That’s nuts. Some of them were fouls. Some of them were questionable. But it is what it is.”

Sure, Durant gets some star treatment. Referees or more ready to blow the whistle when he has the ball and is looking to shoot. That’s the nature of this league and every star player has gotten that treatment before from Michael Jordan to LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki as well.

That’s the most frustrating thing for a defender like Marion. Marion has been one of the best defenders in this league over the past decade and there’s no star treatment for someone like him.

Just watching the game Friday night the calls didn’t seem over the top in favor of Durant. Most of those calls he got Friday night are the same ones he gets all season. Maybe from the Dallas perspective, they seemed unreasonable but that’s how Durant is officiated.

There’s an art to drawing contact and Durant has gotten very good at it. He makes sure you hit him on the arm when he goes up to shoot and he makes sure he gets bumped on the body when he drives the paint. You have to be in very good defensive position to make sure you don’t get called for a foul and that’s hard to do with how long and quick Durant is.

But you just can’t say what Marion did after a game. He knows that and he probably knew the fine would be coming when those words left his mouth. It doesn’t matter who is right here.

Durant went 10-for-27 in Game 1 and then 5-for-17 in Game 2. He has made some big plays most notably the Game 1 game-winner but getting that shooting number up will definitely be a priority for the Thunder moving forward.

Something that Oklahoma City has tried to get better at this season is getting Durant touches closer to the rim and in the post. Durant posted up 10.5 percent of the time this season. Last year he was only posting 6.5 percent of the time and two years ago 5.7 percent.

The 10.5 percent is still kind of low for a player like Durant but a step in the right direction as far as most people are concerned.

In the first two games against Dallas in this series, Durant has posted up 13 times. That doesn’t seem like a ton but it is more than he did during the regular season.

Durant has gone 4-for-8 from the field in those 13 possessions, turned the ball over three times and been fouled twice (once in the act of shooting).

Durant has flat out not appeared very comfortable posting up in these two games. One reason is that Durant has been guarded primarily by Shawn Marion who does a very good job on him.

Durant essentially does two things when he is in the post: he either shoots a jump shot over his right shoulder or tries to go strong to the rim over his left shoulder (or simply toward the middle of the floor usually).

Durant isn’t strong enough yet to develop the kind of post game that Dirk Nowitzki has and that’s surely what Durant is trying to eventually do already using that stepback one-footer (which by the way Durant has far from mastered as it seems to almost never go in).

So what should Durant be doing when he gets the ball in the post against Dallas? We know Oklahoma City is going to continue to try and get him touches down there and it’s a spot where he should be able to score since he is always 4-to-5 inches taller than his defender.

The best thing he ever does is face up. This is usually because he will get pushed out too far and in Durant’s case that’s almost a better thing. When he faces up he can either simply shoot over his defender (probably the best case) or drive strong to his right and draw contact.

When he drive to his right while having his back to the basket he seems to always lose his balance. But when he is already facing he is much more comfortable and can elevate on his way to the rim.

But it’s not always going to be easy for him to face up the way Dallas defends him. They like to get as close as possible to him and really body him up. This means Durant will have to try and go to shots with his back to the basket.

He looks the most comfortable going to the fadeaway over his right shoulder (most righties do). The one problem here and why Durant isn’t more effective with this shot is that he’s not one to put a lot of arc on his jumper like Dirk would. And while fading back that makes the shot very difficult to drop.

I’d like to see Durant try and go glass when he uses his fadeaway. He doesn’t do it often so I’m not going to hold my breath on this one but I think he’d make a higher percentage of these shots.

Either way, when he has his back to the basket he should almost always be going to that fadeaway. It’s an automatic clean look if nothing else.

Depending on how the game is being called I wouldn’t mind him trying to drive but it seems the only good that ever comes from that is a foul being called.

At the end of the day, it’s nice that Durant is posting more but I don’t know how useful it is going to be especially when he has a very solid defender like Marion covering him.

He’s just not ready to dominate from that position and until he learns to, the Thunder might be stuck one notch below the level of champion.

Dallas was executing everything and making clutch shots and the game looked like it was going to come down to the Thunder executing on offense, something they didn’t do last year in the playoffs and something that even this year they still receive a lot of heat for.

They did a great job last night.

Trailing 96-94 with 1:03 left in the game, Thunder head coach Scott Brooks called timeout and called for one of the Thunder’s best sets that they’ve been running recently.

James Harden inbounds to Russell Westbrook who sets up at the top of the key waiting for Kevin Durant and Kendrick Perkins to come up and set a double screen.

Westbrook comes off the Perkins pick to the right predetermined and waits for Perkins to set another pick on Durant’s man to try and free Durant up at the top of the key.

In the past few weeks when the Thunder have run this set it has every time gotten Durant wide open at the top of the key. Last night, Dallas defended it well and Westbrook didn’t make the defense commit too much on him so Durant was covered tightly by Shawn Marion at the top of the key when Westbrook passes to him.

Perkins stays around Durant, reading the defense and realizing that Durant isn’t wide open and sets a ball screen on Marion. Durant uses it well and gets into the paint by Marion and Perkins’ man Ian Mahinmi.

Dirk Nowitzki is forced to come up and help on Durant who is ready (having just dumped off to Serge Ibaka for a dunk a few possession earlier) to find Ibaka cutting who finishes with the and-one dunk.

This has been Oklahoma City’s most effective set the past few weeks and it was great to see them go to it out of a timeout when they really needed a bucket.

Dallas covering it well was kind of a blessing because if Durant had been left wide open and tempted to take the three, he may have gone for it and missed since he was off with his shot for most of the night.

This was a better set for Oklahoma City to run at this time because if they had gone to the Westbrook-Durant pick-and-pop (which they do often down the stretch), it may have just resulted in a switch and Durant forced into a tough isolation jumper.

This is evidence of the Thunder taking steps in the right direction with their play down the stretch of tight games.