OKC Thunder: Steven Adams is the team’s lovable disappointment

Steven Adams is a gentle giant beloved by the OKC Thunder fan base but will never live up to his full potential.

OKC Thunder starting center Steven Adams is easy to love. His accent makes Americans swoon. Despite his otherworldly strength (he’s thought by his peers to be the strongest man in the NBA), his on-court play is defined by moments of chivalry.

He walks away from fights and saves opponents from dangerous falls. His winsome nonchalance makes him one of the funniest interviews in the NBA. On top of all that, he’s been a crucial part of the OKC Thunder, which has been one the league’s winningest teams since he took over the starting center role from the fossil known to us today as perkinsus kendrickus.

Steven Adams is a good player and a wonderful person, but he is not the player he could have been.

The Thunder once saw Adams as a franchise big man. NBA teams don’t give $100 million contracts to players they don’t expect to make an All-Star team. But at age 27, when he should be hitting an All-Star level prime, Adams is treading the same plateau he crested when he first signed that contract.

OKC Thunder big man Steven Adams will never be an All-Star

To be clear, Steven Adams is a good NBA player. Casual fans look at his counting numbers and complain they’ve gone down, but his statistics on a per-36 minutes basis, which is how we compare apples to apples, have crept up every year he’s been in the league.

True, his per-36 scoring dipped slightly in the 2020 season, but he was playing a new role as a facilitator from the high post, and he played it well. Adams doubled his previous career-high assist rate, driving up the total points he produced while on the floor.

Adams also helps in ways that don’t show up on the stat sheet. He is one of the league’s most frequent and effective screeners. Those screens create the crucial first crack in the defense that leads to rotations and subsequently to passes resulting in quality shots for the OKC Thunder.

Adams is also a defensive anchor, calling out screens and cuts and rotating to cut off drives. Most of the time, he’s a walking textbook.

There’s also no doubting that Adams is a great teammate. Anyone can see in five minutes of him talking that he’s easy to get along with.

He famously forfeited rebounds to Russell Westbrook, and he will do anything the team asks him to do, including blitzing pick-and-rolls thirty feet from the basket, a task almost never required of guys who weigh 270 pounds.

Despite being asked to chase world-class athletes around the floor on switches, bang bodies with human rhinos, and take cheap shots below the belt – sometimes all in the same play – Steven Adams complains about as often as Maggie Simpson talks.

Unfortunately, the NBA doesn’t pick an All-Stoics team. In order to be an All-Star, Adams would need to average better than 14 points and nine rebounds — his best season average to date.

This lack of production is not just a matter of him being a role player. Adams has been one of the team’s most efficient scorers for years. He led the team in effective field goal percentage in four of the past five campaigns, eclipsing 60 percent over that period. He could sustain a higher scoring load.

He’s also had seasons where he led the NBA in box-outs. Adams could be a 20-point, 13-rebound a night guy and help his team win doing it. But Adams is a shy scorer. He is the anti-Coby White.

Certainly, health is a big part of Adams’s story. He takes an endless stream of hard hits and always seems to be playing through pain. Surprisingly, Adams has only missed 26 games in his seven seasons with the OKC Thunder.

Perhaps the team has been too impatient in bringing him back, causing his injuries to linger. Whatever the cause, Adams looks positively arthritic by the time March rolls around. But his mysterious health struggles don’t tell the whole tale.

Steven Adams offensive choices limit his potential

Too often, Adams will catch the ball with no defender in sight and never look at the basket. Alternatively, he randomly is aggressive against certain matchups when it doesn’t help the team. For example, he repeatedly isolated versus Enes Kanter in the post in the 2019 series against the Blazers.

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Kanter is a slow-footed plodder with many weaknesses to exploit on defense. The one thing he is qualified to do is to stand his ground in the post, planted like a windmill, arms raised, yet Adams chose to joust with him. His mentality is less Mamba, more Roomba.

Of course, Steven Adams is near and dear to the hearts of Thunder fans everywhere. He’s a good and useful player, and he’s a franchise treasure in the mold of Mr. Thunder himself, Nick Collison.

Moreover, Adams is clearly a better player than Collison was, on top of replicating the humility and selflessness that made us fall in love with the big man from Kansas. If likeability led to win shares, Adams would be the MVP.

But due to his nagging injuries and his lack of a killer instinct, Adams never became the player we and Sam Presti envisioned when we saw a hyperathletic Kiwi monster doing everything in the 2016 playoffs.

That’s why Stevens Adams is a beloved disappointment, and that’s why, when he signs his next contract in the summer of 2021, his salary will be cut in half.