Hollinger: Thunder’s massive leap ended in disappointment. What comes next is crucial

Every tight NBA playoff series reaches a point where a team has to throw everything else to the side and ride with the five guys it thinks can get it to the finish line. It’s the truest test of who and what a team believes in.

That moment came with five minutes left in Game 6 of the Dallas-Oklahoma City Western Conference semifinals series. We had spent five games building to it, but in an elimination game separated by just three points, the Thunder showed us what they believed in most: a frontcourt pairing of Jaylin Williams and Chet Holmgren that had seen just 92 minutes of use in the regular season.

Oklahoma City rode that lineup, along with perimeter mainstays Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Lu Dort and Jalen Williams, from the 5:19 mark all the way to a must-score possession with 27 seconds left, when Isaiah Joe came in for Jaylin Williams.

It didn’t work all that well, as Oklahoma City still got mashed on the glass. This clip below of P.J. Washington easily discarding Jaylin Williams to rebound a missed free throw — he almost had a tip-in dunk, for crying out loud — and setting up his own game-tying 3 will stick in the craw of Thunder fans for a long time. It was one of six offensive boards Dallas got in the last eight minutes of its Game 6 victory.

More important, however, was what this lineup told us about the Thunder.

They had tried fairly earnestly to prepare for this moment in the regular season, experimenting with different lineups and working out different offensive strategies for when teams inevitably put their center on Josh Giddey and a smaller player on Holmgren. They talked pretty openly about how they expected teams to try this in the playoffs and were perhaps too confident in their ability to handle it. That said, their plan seemed to be working when Giddey repeatedly punished the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round for trying the same strategy.

Once Giddey began bonking 3s in the Dallas series, however, his leash became shorter than a Tom Thibodeau playoff rotation. The Thunder weren’t going to let him ride this out, especially if he was going to be a minus on defense too; the lack of belief in Giddey was apparent by Game 3, and he only played 11 minutes in the final two games.

This is what makes it so hard for a young team — and coach — to run through the playoffs the first couple times. They have ideas about what it might look like, but they don’t know yet, and often, they don’t know what they don’t know.

If the Thunder really thought a Williams-Holmgren frontcourt would be their salvation, they probably would have spent more time with that in-season (although they did give it a few minutes of run in the Pelicans series). Instead, that lineup was a desperation heave when Plans A through J were found wanting.

Let me emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with that. Twenty-nine NBA teams have their seasons end with some level of disappointment, and that’s true even for the ones that had largely successful campaigns.

At the start of October, anyone in Oklahoma City — fan, player, coach, whoever — would have gladly accepted “57 wins and stout six-game second-round playoff exit” as the 2023-24 season’s outcome. The Thunder were widely seen as being a year away from the big jump, and their offseason moves (using their cap room to acquire even more draft picks, rather than supplemental players) seemed to indicate they felt the same way internally.

Instead, they earned the top seed in the Western Conference, had the NBA’s second-best point differential and had their best player finish second in MVP voting. Even in defeat, they were not humiliated — the final scoring tally on the six-game series with Dallas was 636-636, and you can make a strong argument that the make-or-miss-league gods had a heavy influence on the outcome.

Dallas mucked things up, but still, the Thunder were capable of some beautiful basketball. Look at this sequence from the second quarter of Game 6, for instance, where the threat of a Gilgeous-Alexander post-up is a decoy for a Joe pop-out that leads to a Holmgren short roll and an instant, correct decision to find an open 3 for Cason Wallace. Frame this:

Nonetheless, history will note the Mavs series as a missed opportunity. The Thunder blew a 17-point lead in Game 6, got smashed on the boards by a player they traded on draft night, had some tactical moments in the middle of the series they’d probably like to have back and showed their youth at times in a way they hadn’t in the regular season — such as when Jalen Williams seemed to lose track of the clock at the end of the third quarter of Game 6.

Looking ahead, they now have the advantage of much more information. Some questions they had were answered negatively (Giddey as a playoff role player), others more positively (Gilgeous-Alexander as a leading man in a playoff series). Others get an incomplete (can they really win at the highest levels being this bad on the glass?).

The timing of all that is very interesting, because Oklahoma City has a tremendous opportunity in the short term. Yes, the Thunder are pleading patience and the team is quite young, but they also have an extraordinary cap situation, with a two-year window with both Holmgren and Jalen Williams on rookie contracts.

That means the Thunder could bring in another max-level player for two years with their cap room and still stay under the luxury tax. With their war chest of future draft picks and a few tradeable young players (Giddey, for all the knocks he took against Dallas, would be a much more interesting player on some other rosters than he is on the Thunder’s), engineering a deal won’t be the hard part. Identifying the right player fit is the challenge.

But I wonder, when the Thunder look at this team and this opportunity, how much they think about Game 2 of the 2012 NBA Finals in Oklahoma City.

The Thunder narrowly lost that game to the Miami Heat, 100-96, to even the series at one game apiece. Oh well, we thought, surely they’d be back — presumably a week later for Game 6. They had 23-year-olds Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and 22-year-olds James Harden and Serge Ibaka.

We still haven’t been back for an NBA Finals game. LeBron James happened, with some splashes of Mike Miller in between, and the Heat won the final three games of that series in Miami. The Thunder traded Harden in 2012, and Westbrook got hurt in the 2013 playoffs, then the Spurs ran circles around them in 2014. Durant broke his foot in 2015, and Game 6 Klay Thompson happened in 2016, then Durant left as it all ended.

The future is not assured, and while, on paper, Oklahoma City’s is as bright as any team’s in basketball, its current excellence leans heavily on Gilgeous-Alexander being a top-five player in the league right now. At some point, he might have to pass the torch to Williams and Holmgren, but we’re years away from that; thus, maxing out the human Slinky’s prime is the challenge of the next several seasons.

The Thunder can attack this from a much more powerful place based on what they learned in the postseason. Yes, they struggled on the glass, but the more glaring need was for a secondary playmaker with size. I’m not sure that was totally apparent until Dallas made it so.

In that sense, you applaud the Gordon Hayward trade even if it didn’t work out — this was exactly the type of big, secondary connector with shooting skill who could have given them a leg up on playoff defenses, and targeting that skill rather than a hulking five who would have slowed them down was the right play. Alas, Hayward’s one-man protest against shot clocks scotched that idea, even as Oklahoma City gave it every opportunity (and then some) to work.

Big picture, going from a good team to a great one is the most difficult step, but the Thunder have all the prerequisites checked off: They won 57 games, have a linchpin superstar and young players who should only get better and the most enviable cap and draft-pick situation in the league.

Now, it’s all about consolidating this new information — some of which they didn’t know until two weeks ago — and identifying which players fit best around their three young diamonds.

Finding the right fifth starter is a big ask — there aren’t a lot of 6-8 skill guys who are also plus rebounders and switchable defenders just sitting around waiting to be traded. But if the Thunder can nail this final phase of team building, we’ll be back in Oklahoma for an NBA Finals game — again and again and again.

(Top photo of the Oklahoma City Thunder: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)