We know just how incredible the regular season was for the Oklahoma City Thunder. They won 68 games, becoming just the seventh team in the illustrious history of the NBA to do so over the course of an 82-game regular season slate. But now, the biggest challenge they face in their Western Conference semifinal matchup with the Denver Nuggets lies in the fact that their opponent has far more playoff experience than they.
Let's be clear — Winning 68 games is an incredibly impressive achievement. If it wasn't that difficult, more than six teams in the history of the league before this year would have done it. The Thunder put themselves into an extremely elite category with their performance in the regular season. But here's the thing: The playoffs are a completely different animal.
Playoff basketball is almost a different sport from regular season basketball in this day and age. Oklahoma City showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can completely and totally wreck whatever team you put in front of them between October and April. But once the postseason begins, things become different.
This is not to say that the Thunder can't or won't win a championship, by the way. I'm simply pointing out the fact that dominating in the regular season does not equal dominating in the playoffs. And this is something this OKC team is learning on the fly.
The Thunder are facing a more playoff-tested team in Denver
Once again, that's not necessarily a bad thing either. This is the second year this iteration of the Thunder has been in the playoffs. You can't get postseason experience until you actually make it there, right? That's what we're seeing unfold in real time.
After a Game 1 where Oklahoma City got burned for fouling up three and let Aaron Gordon hit a game-winning shot, they quickly came to understand what they got wrong. The Thunder made their adjustments and proceeded to blow out the Nuggets in Game 2 on Wednesday night.
In a way, you could say the Cleveland Cavaliers are facing a similar set of circumstances as the Thunder over in the Eastern Conference. They won 64 games in the regular season and dominated everyone. Now, they sit in an 0-2 hole against the Indiana Pacers — Again, like Denver, a team with a significant advantage when it comes to prior postseason experience.
The difference here being, at this point in time, Oklahoma City has done a better job of adjusting and learning lessons quickly on the fly than Cleveland. Things can fall apart quickly for even great teams in the playoffs under the wrong circumstances, but the Thunder deserve credit for pulling themselves together quickly enough to regain control of this series as they head to Denver for Games 3 and 4.