OKC Thunder head coach Billy Donovan enters do-or-die season

Win-now mode

Though the Thunder isn’t a necessarily old team, they probably don’t have more than a few more years left with this core, at least at this level of competitiveness.

Westbrook is going to be 30 years old by the seasons end and given the mileage on his legs and the fact that his game is almost entirely reliant on ridiculous athleticism and aggression, his game is probably going to decline rapidly in the next few years. How much longer do you think a 29 year-old point guard can keep doing things like this:

And although Paul George is a top-15 player in the league, he’s never been someone who can be the number one scorer on a contending team and always functions best as a secondary star.

Furthermore, the OKC Thunder are almost entirely capped out right now and don’t really have a way out of their biggest contracts barring a major rebuild. The team they have presently is largely the team they’re going to be stuck with for the foreseeable future. And look, this is probably going to be a really good team. But they have glaring holes up and down the roster that have plagued them for years.

Is Donovan a good enough coach to at least start to cover up the teams shortcomings and try to squeeze more wins out of this roster? The Thunder need to find that out soon, but the evidence so far has been less than encouraging.