OKC Thunder return to identity – 3 takeaways from important win vs. Blazers

Perimeter dominance?

So here is the thing about being the worst perimeter shooting team in the Association – when you’re struggling the game plan by your opponents will be to slack off you. What that’s created is suddenly every opponent is giving the OKC Thunder wide open opportunities from behind the arc.

Couple that with the sudden sharp shooting of Terrance Ferguson, Patrick Patterson discovering his stroke (as he’s wont to do in the New Year) and other’s like Abdel Nader contributing and you suddenly have a team who are making their opponents pay for leaving them open.

You might remember Stephen Dolan wrote about the typical ebbs and flows of players who go through shooting slumps and how they eventually even out.  So, while this current stage may be erroring on the higher side of efficiency it does stand to reason the Thunder are more likely closer to the middle than as poor as their first half might indicate.

On this night the Thunder were at their very best from behind the line connecting on 11 of their 23 attempts or 47.8 percent. Meanwhile, the Blazers shot much closer to what the Thunder typically do (27.8 percent).

More impressively the Thunder shot a decent percentage from the charity stripe where they connected on 78.8 percent of their attempts (26-33). That’s a full seven percent better than they shoot in season.