Thunder ready to use Las Vegas, NBA Cup to assert themselves as Western Conference’s superpower

There’s an unspoken rule of ascension in the NBA that dictates any new team hoping to rise up the league’s hierarchy needs to start that process by defeating the team that had previously beaten them. 

It’s not an absolute, but the beginning for one super power almost always coincides with the downfall of a rival. Michael Jordan and the Pistons. LeBron James and the Celtics. Both the Bucks and Celtics in recent years have kicked off championship runs by exorcising old demons against the Heat. The Nuggets did so against the Suns. It’s standard NBA procedure.

Regular-season games aren’t quite as meaningful on that front as postseason series, but it certainly didn’t feel that way as the Oklahoma City Thunder ran the Dallas Mavericks off of the floor 118-104 on Tuesday in the quarterfinals of the NBA Cup. 

It wasn’t exactly a preview of what a possible playoff rematch would look like. The Thunder, now 19-5, still don’t have Chet Holmgren back. An illness has been making its way through the Dallas locker room lately, and that kept P.J. Washington out on Tuesday. But Tuesday’s battle was fought on many of the same strategic fronts that last year’s second-round series was, and the Thunder won them all emphatically.

Thunder dominated Luka and the Mavs defensively

Dallas won that series primarily in two places: on the boards and in the corners. The Mavericks out-rebounded the Thunder by 28 across six second-round games. Oklahoma City introduced Isaiah Hartenstein into the equation on Tuesday and out-rebounded the Mavericks 52-44. 

Dallas averaged 16.2 corner 3s per game in that series, a figure that would have led the league by a mile over the full season. They still got 14 on Tuesday, but many came in the fourth quarter when the game appeared mostly out of hand. The Thunder contested many of the others. The ones they didn’t largely went to shooters they were willing to ignore.

Oklahoma City allows those corner 3s by design. They’re the natural consequence of trapping Luka Doncic. But that approach proved significantly more effective this time around. Doncic averaged nearly 25 points and nine assists in that series, but was held to an inefficient 16 and five in this one. That’s a testament to the defensive depth Oklahoma City has accumulated. 

Doncic didn’t just spend this game in the Dorture chamber. Lu Dort, Alex Caruso and Cason Wallace all took turns harassing him. Everyone else largely held up in pick-and-roll, preventing Doncic from racking up too many easy lobs or the free runs to the basket created by the fear of those passes. Taking Doncic out of the game neutralized just about everyone else. The discombobulated Mavericks turned the ball over 18 times. 

Thunder can make a statement in Las Vegas

The Thunder looked, as they have all year, like the best defense in the NBA.

And their win on Tuesday gives them an opportunity to showcase that. Oklahoma City’s status as the favorite in the Western Conference has been more or less accepted by fans and critics, but there’s a difference between the intellectual process of comparing rosters on paper and the reality of earning such credit on the court. Getting that big win over Dallas, especially with a Doncic-less loss to the Mavericks in November already under their belt, was a critical first step.

But now the whole NBA world will be watching when the Thunder arrive in Las Vegas. In the NBA Cup semifinals, they will face either the NBA’s most recent dynasty in the Golden State Warriors or a similarly young and up-and-coming defensive juggernaut in the Houston Rockets. 

Beating them, and subsequently the last remaining Eastern Conference foe, won’t guarantee them anything this spring. But it will be a statement to the league that Oklahoma City’s ascension is at hand. This isn’t the young team with a million draft picks anymore. It’s a fully-fledged conference favorite ready to start putting heads above its mantle. 

The Mavericks on Tuesday were only the beginning.