The Oklahoma City Thunder saw the full effects of their injury woes take hold on Wednesday night against the Dallas Mavericks. With Jalen Williams, Cason Wallace, Chet Holmgren, and Alex Caruso all out of the lineup, Oklahoma City simply didn't have enough offensive juice to truly supplement the efforts of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Ajay Mitchell across the full 48 minutes.
They dropped the game, 96-120, and it felt like we saw a truly depleted Thunder squad for the first time this season.
Holmgren and Caruso will likely be back in the near future. But Williams and Wallace are set to miss most, if not all, of this season, and that represents a major blow to this rotation as we knew it. Daigneault has made clear that he's going to open up opportunities for many of Oklahoma City's young players—that sort of insurance is the reason why the organization held onto its draft picks this offseason.
The landscape of this roster has been irrevocably changed by the absences of Williams and Wallace, and that's going to alter the rotational outlook for virtually every player on this team. That includes Josh Dix—although his first two games with significant minutes looked far from productive.
Dix already had the inside track to claiming the 15th roster spot once Otega Oweh went down with an Achilles injury in the preseason. But now that the pressure is on for the Thunder to shore up this rotation and identify real contributors over the course of the season, that path has simultaneously become both steeper and more accessible for a player of Dix's skill set.
The Thunder need someone to claim that 15th roster spot this season—will Dix be ready?
On a fully healthy Thunder roster, the 15th roster spot would be of little consequence. It would be a way to reward a two-way player for having an excellent season and fitting well into the team's structure, or it would be a way to add a cheap piece on the buyout market with little chance of playing a rotational playoff role. But if Williams and Wallace are both out, that 15th spot effectively becomes the 13th. If the Thunder suffer any more injuries—well, you get the picture.
Daigneault is going to want to run his rotation deep this year in order to account for those absences. That likely wasn't just an isolated instance against Dallas. If this team is going to enter the postseason with any shot at another championship run, he's going to need to take as much of the burden off of Gilgeous-Alexander's shoulders as possible. The superstar looked absolutely gassed last night by the start of the second half, and that's simply not a sustainable way for him to play over the course of an 82-game campaign.
So, the path there is more accessible for Dix, at least on the surface. He played a combined 46 minutes between the Mavericks matchup and the prior game against the Phoenix Suns—and that's more than he likely would've seen in an entire month if the rotation was whole. Two-way players are only eligible for 65 regular-season games on their contracts, so Oklahoma City would need to convert Dix to a standard deal if they wanted him to become a regular part of the rotation.
But at the same time, the importance of that roster spot has also increased, and it's likely that the expectations for the player that will ultimately fill that have as well. We saw some confident shooting from Dix in the preseason, but he's still an undrafted free agent—with his own mix of inconsistencies and drawbacks to his game. He's shot just 1-for-11 from the floor and 0-for-8 from 3-point range across his two regular season appearances, and he hasn't looked as fully engaged on the defensive end as Oklahoma City would likely want to see. He's a prospect that's going to need time to develop into an NBA level shooter, let alone a complete rotational player.
Now, we're only five games into the season—and two games into the new shape of this Thunder rotation. It's certainly not time to write off Dix as an eventual rotational option, especially for an Oklahoma City team in need of wing depth.
But with new addition Micah Peavy also playing on a two-way deal and the potential of the buyout market looming as the season wears on, the onus is now on Dix to prove himself as a rotation-worthy player with the minutes he's given. That simply wasn't there before the injuries occurred.
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