With Chet Holmgren out, what will the Oklahoma City Thunder do now?

You don’t replace a player like Chet Holmgren, really. The game-breaking big man has proven such a perfect fit for the Thunder and checks so many boxes in one tidy 7-foot-1 package — as a floor-spacing 3-point shooter, as an elite rim protector, as a complementary face-up and off-the-bounce scoring threat, as the missing-piece cog who makes Mark Daigneault’s five-out offensive scheme really sing, etc. — that there aren’t very many like-for-like replacements available when he isn’t. (It’s not like you can just sign Kristaps Porziņģis, Myles Turner or Jay Huff off the scrap heap, you know?)

So after Holmgren hit the deck hard after contesting an Andrew Wiggins drive on Sunday night, needing to be helped off the court with what was later diagnosed as a fractured hip, everybody knew that a Thunder team that had risen to the top of the West behind a historically elite defense backstopped by its ascendant center would need to find another way to win. And with Oklahoma City’s two other bona fide bigs — offseason signing Isaiah Hartenstein and third-year pro Jaylin Williams — also on the shelf for at least the next few weeks, just “slot in another tall guy” isn’t an option.

Slotting in another small(er) guy, though, is.

Without the league’s No. 2 shot-blocker lurking to clean up messes at the basket, Daigneault leaned into Oklahoma City’s estimable wing depth against the Clippers on Monday. The Thunder have spent plenty of time the past few seasons playing small-and-or-thin up front — miss u, Poku — so downshifting, as Daigneault and Gilgeous-Alexander both noted Monday, isn’t as novel or shocking as it might be for other teams. So Oklahoma City started small and stayed small, fielding lineups almost entirely devoid of players taller than 6-foot-6. (We see you, Ousmane Dieng.) The bet: an armada of knife-handed maniacs on the perimeter would be able to disrupt L.A.’s offensive flow enough with active hands, early rotations and opportunistic traps to win the possession battle.

Fortunately for the Thunder, they still have Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. (Photo by Joshua Gateley/Getty…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-12 19:25:00

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