Tuning the Thunder backcourt

Billy Donovan has been handed the keys to the Thunder muscle car. The backcourt needs to be tuned to have it purring for the finals.

To get to the finish line first, you need to tune your car better than those around you and have them all working in perfect harmony to beat the rest of the pack. Billy Donovan has 82 laps of tuning the Thunder machine before they lose half the chasing pack in the run to the checkered flag.

The back-court is the engine of this beast and Coach Donovan needs all he can out of it if he is to beat the top class teams of Golden State, San Antonio and Cleveland. Russell Westbrook is the turbo but all other players are moving parts that must tune perfectly with the turbo to obtain peak performance.

So, Coach Donovan has his starting point guard in Westbrook. There is no one on the team that can come anywhere near his ability in that position so that is a given. Andre Roberson is the starting shooting guard, he cannot shoot very well, but he is a lock down defender who pressures the opposition from the opening tip-off and has been making a few threes lately.

From this point, what Donovan does is an experiment. What it appears that he is trying to do is get a core group of players who play together as much as possible before the post season so that in the high stakes games they have a chemistry which will get them through the tight situations. Donovan is persevering with Dion Waiters as his preferred 6th man at the moment. He is averaging 9.6 points per game which is passable but his consistency is not. His past five games he has scored 43 points at an average of 8.6 points per game. Where is the inconsistency you ask? Simple, more than half those points were scored in one game (22 vs Sacramento). You can’t have fuel flowing into the engine at different rates, it causes the engine to cough and splutter.

Randy Foye appears to be the next guard that Donovan turns to, a career 37 percent shooter from three and has a career average of 11 points per game. In the eight games that he has played for the Thunder he is a 25 percent three point shooter with an average of 3.8 points per game. Not the numbers that Sam Presti was hoping for when he traded for him. What Foye does do well is look after the ball, which is something that the Thunder have struggled with. They are fifth worst in the league with 15.7 turnovers per game. In the 18 minutes per game that Foye is currently playing, he is averaging only 0.5 turnovers per game. Donovan will be hoping that he can regain his shooting touch before the playoffs so that he can really help this team.

I am including Kyle Singler in this analysis due to the fact that Donovan appears to be using him as a 3-and-d wing. His shooting stroke has come back over the last few games and while he is only averaging 3.3 points per game for the season, his last five have netted 32 points at 6.4 points per game. While this improvement has not resulted in many Thunder wins, it is good to see Singler being known for his basketball again, not just his haircut.

Cameron Payne is an interesting one for Donovan. He is a young raw rookie who has shown flashes of promise with a whole heap of passion thrown in. Unfortunately, Payne is raw, and in the high pressure against teams like Golden State and Cleveland he really struggled in the nations spotlight. Since the arrival of Foye, Payne has seen his minutes cut drastically, if he even gets on the floor at all. I can see Donovan using him if the team is getting into a situation where they are not scoring and need some spark. He will continue to develop and I believe will start seeing more court time next year unless Foye continues to struggle for the rest of this season.

Finally there is Anthony Morrow, remember him? Sometimes even Billy Donovan remembers him and puts him on the court. Morrow is one of the best three point marksman in the game today. He is obviously no Stephen Curry but his catch and shoot is phenomenal. Unfortunately his defense is not.When Morrow is on the court, he needs to have a strong rim protector with him but as he is mainly used with the second unit, this means that he would be playing with Enes Kanter a lot. Kanter is good offensively but is not so on defense. So Morrow and Kanter together means that opposition teams score quite freely.

With all that being said, there is not a back court for the Thunder that is perfect. They all have problems. It is up to Coach Donovan to get his players playing the way that benefits the team the most and to do that he has to give extended minutes to players who are not performing well at the moment. Oklahoma City will make the playoffs, and if the make it is the third seed then they are likely to face San Antonio in the second round, followed by Golden State in the Western conference finals. To beat both these teams in a series, the Thunder are going to have to be at their best at the right time.

Next: OKC Power Rankings: Week 20

To this end, OKC fans, I call for patience. I know that there is frustration with Foye, and that Waiters island has only two residents being Dion himself and Donovan. It has taken Singler almost 60 games this season to figure out his role, so lets hope that Foye is a quicker learner than that.

For OKC to win the title, all members of the team need to perform at the critical time, being the playoffs. However, in order for this to happen their engine needs to be purring so that the rest of the chassis can move with it.