The OKC Thunder will play in their first regular-season home game in front of their fans since March 11th, 2020. What will be a special day, a sign of returning to normalcy, and a community building and uniting event no matter what happens on the basketball floor. The Oklahoma City Thunder are 0-2 still searching for their first win of the season and remain fully healthy.
All 17-players on the roster are available tonight heading in, which makes Mark Daigneault’s job slightly tougher especially weeks out from the OKC Blue, and the NBA G-League, starting. As the head ball coach explained players 5-17 on the roster only have marginal differences. Thus, a lot of players have arguments to earn rotational minutes or more minutes than they are currently receiving.
If you take to Twitter or fan forums and ask OKC Thunder fans who deserves more minutes on this team, you can see ten or so different answers. Some of that will be worked out as the team can begin shuffling guys to the OKC Blue to get extra work in as the Blue play their home games at the Paycom Center this year.
OKC Thunder fully healthy as 76ers miss big pieces
Despite the Oklahoma City Thunder being fully healthy, their opposition will miss big pieces tonight. On top of Ben Simmons, who has played a cat and mouse game all year long when it comes to playing for Philly, the team will be without Andre Drummond, Shake Milton, Grant Riller, and list Joel Embiid as questionable tonight in Bricktown.
If the 76ers end up missing both Embiid and Drummond, it will be a big break for Mark Daigneault’s squad which lacks any paint protection and could give the Thunder a slight advantage down-low with their fully healthy big man rotation of Favors, Roby, and Robinson-Earl, without the traditional big threat, OKC can match up with any scheme Doc Rivers elects to deploy.