The Oklahoma City Thunder are the real deal.
They came into Boston after back-to-back games against Denver and showed no signs of fatigue in their third game in four nights. A hostile crowd was amped up for revenge and looking for their champion Celtics to send a message to the league, and the Thunder didn’t care.
“You have to punch first,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said after his team’s win. “Because the crowd and the atmosphere and they're in their comfort zone. And then you have to be very disciplined and those are the things we focused on. Just punching first, trying to throw the first punch in the game and then making sure that we follow the game plan and stuck to it for the full 48 minutes.”
The game plan, as it always is for the Thunder, is to push the limits of tough, physical defense. They will reach and poke and grab as often as they are allowed. They play with incredible discipline and pace which allows them to dictate the terms of the game.
“Tougher team sets the rules,” Jaylen Brown said after maybe his worst game of the season. “You got to meet that level, be more physical, and that's something that I take pride in. You know, being able to win those matchups, physicality-wise. I didn't win those matchups tonight … I just didn't meet that level tonight.”
He wasn’t alone. The Celtics committed 25 personal fouls leading to 35 Thunder free throws because OKC was the aggressor, and the Celtics were on their heels. The pace at which the Thunder play, led by Gilgeous-Alexander’s relentless drives, test a defense’s discipline. All too often, the Celtics failed.
“We foul a 3-point shooter at the end of the quarter, we jump on a pump fake, we don’t show our hands on a tendency drive,” Joe Mazzulla said. “There’s a level of physicality that you have to play with. You also have to do your best to defend without fouling, so just a small balance there, but definitely ones that we could take away.”
Showing hands on a tendency drive means not reaching when SGA barrels his way down the lane, because he’ll just do this:
— Wildes (@kevinwildes) March 13, 2025
Brown was reaching, Gilgeous-Alexander felt the arm on his body, and he rose up. Did he hook Brown’s arm? He sure did, but he also made the hook part of his gather. It’s a grift, but it’s also a foul, and because Brown was reaching instead of showing his hands so the refs could see he was defending with his body, there was no easy to win this challenge.
High-level basketball is about discipline, and Oklahoma City had more of it than Boston.
“You’ve got to really focus on the margins,” Jayson Tatum said. “(We had) some live-ball turnovers. Giving a team like that second -and third-chance opportunities on rebounds – whether it was the foul at the end of the first quarter – just little things like that against a really good team can be the difference.”
The Celtics only had one more turnover than the Thunder but OKC had twice as many points off those turnovers. Boston took 12 more shots but only made one more field goal. The Celtics had to work hard for everything they got and their mistakes were more costly because the Thunder defense was swarming and tenacious. Whatever gaps Boston created were slammed shot in an instant.
“The biggest thing against them is you got to just understand that they're going to make some tough shots,” Mark Daignault said. “You just can't overreact. You stick to the plan, but it takes maturity. Guys want to win and there's a tendency sometimes to want to do more, but sometimes that's not the best thing when it comes to closeouts … (we showed) great poise and maturity.”
This might very well be a preview of what we’ll see in June. Despite this loss, the Celtics are still the odds-on favorite to get to the NBA Finals again. The Thunder might have a tough time getting there, but they’ve shown all season long that they have what it takes to win.
Recent talk, thanks to Draymond Green, has centered around OKC’s lack of playoff experience as a reason not to take them seriously. There might be a kernel of truth to that, but that's also the same thing people said about the Celtics last season. Boston has gotten to where the Thunder want to go.
And maybe that's why OKC has played Boston so tough in these two games. The extra sauce to these games has given SGA and his Thunder something to chase. In the old WWF, they used to juice someone’s push by getting him to beat the champ in non-title matches to make him seem like a real threat. Despite some online banter about the officiating, this isn’t the same kind of scripted entertainment, but the Thunder are happy to follow that same basic model for now.
“It's huge,” Gilgeous Alexander said. “Because they've done what we're trying to do, the games against them are always going to be heightened. They're always going to be a little bit more exciting. They, like I said, achieved what we are trying to accomplish and there's no better test in NBA.
“You play for late June and the other team had won late June. So playing against them is always fun, always a really big challenge and something that we get to test ourselves against them. I guess we passed two tests so far.”