OKC Thunder Film Room: Breaking down game two loss

The OKC Thunder dropped game two in Portland, to fall behind 0-2 in the series. What went wrong for OKC?

The OKC Thunder are on the brink of losing in the first road for a third straight season and just dropped their 11th straight road game in the postseason. Is it time to panic?

We all considered game one an outlier. Enes Kanter dominated, Damian Lillard shot the lights out, the OKC Thunder could not hit water out of a boat, and Paul George was a wounded duck.

Surely, the OKC Thunder would bounce back and it would all even out, right?

Well, that is not exactly how it all played out. Just like in the game one breakdown, we will go through each matchup from last night, and take a deeper look at what went wrong for the OKC Thunder.

But, let’s start with the coaching staff from each side.

Coaches:

Terry Stotts again just relied on his two stars to take over, and to their credit, they did a takeover and dominated this game.

Stotts did limit Kanter to 20 minutes, and part of that is due to his four fouls, but Stotts also saw “Oh wait, game one was a fluke, you really can not play Kanter!” as he watched the OKC Thunder attack Enes Kanter throughout the first quarter and help them jump out to an early lead.

Billy Donovan, on the other hand, had a not so good game.

Raymond Felton earned 14 minutes, though that number was really his normal ten minutes, plus four minutes after Donovan waved the white flag and conceded game two down 22.

The OKC Thunder did not take the ball inside enough in the second half, and we all know how that ended up.

One of the most concerning things to me about Billy Donovan’s coaching job from Tuesday night was the fact that he had to burn a timeout while the OKC Thunder were in a half court set as Dennis Schroder was handling the ball near the timeline.

Donovan called a timeout and cameras caught him saying “Three out…Three out!” to presumably Dennis Schroder the teams point guard on the floor at the time. Three out is a common set, and that tells me they were not running what he wanted them to.

Here is the concerning part, most coaches can get a team into a new set from the sidelines, and at the time, the Thunder were playing offense on the same side as the Thunder bench. So that makes me jump to the conclusion that there were multiple possessions where his set calls were ignored or executed wrong.

Coaches at any level do not burn a timeout to correct a set, they scream it over and over again and the players correct it. That resulted in the OKC Thunder having two timeouts left in the third quarter. That number could have come back to haunt them if they played a tight game down the stretch, and also hindered Donovan’s ability to call a timeout to settle the team down when Portland went on their run.