Kevin Durant snaps out of it to save the Thunder, 98-95

BOX SCORE

I’m looking over this here official rulebook, and according to it, if you finish a game with more points than your opponent when the final regulation buzzer sounds after 48 minutes, you qualify for a win in the standings.

I’m still not sure this one should count, though.

There are four key points to note about it, in terms of summary:

1. With 8:24 left in the third, Billy Donovan called a timeout clearly looking to spark the team and get their attention. They led 54-51 but came out of the break lacking anything resembling energy. They responded with an 8-0 run in two minutes, then built it to a 13-1 spurt to go up by as many as 17. They led 76-64 after three quarters.

2. Kevin Durant checked back in with 7:13 remaining, joining Russell Westbrook, and the Thunder were leading 84-76.

3. With 5:28 left, the Kings took the lead on an 11-0 run, which extended out to a 13-0 run. Eventually they went up 93-86 with 3:04 left.

4. Kevin Durant hit an and-1 jumper with 1:17 to bring the Thunder within two (he missed the free throw) and then the go-ahead jumper with 23 seconds left.

What happened within those four points tells a big ol’ story about where this team currently is at, and where it might be going. There are two perspectives to take: 1) that the collapse tells a far bigger tale than the comeback, highlighting the issues the team has and only delays the fact they’re not in a good place or 2) the comeback shows they still have that winning ability, to make just enough plays to get it done and there’s something to build off of within the positive stretches of play combined with closing on a 12-2 run.

“We definitely want to be better, but if we look at the stat sheet, they scored because we turned the ball over,” Durant said. “If I didn’t have 10 turnovers they probably would’ve shot 33 percent from the field and we would’ve won by 16 or 17 points. We were up already and we still made a lot of mistakes.”

Durant had a triple-double — 20 points, 10 rebounds and 10 turnovers — and was just, well, listless for most of the game. He seemed off, never really getting into the game. It’s not that he wasn’t trying, but you could tell the frustration of the game was starting to get to him. The Kings were sending strange double-teams, using their guards as a second defender to try and take away his dribble penetration. His turnovers were mostly due to being out of sync with teammates or misreading the double, with him throwing backdoor passes when someone was popping.

“Nobody wants to turn the ball over,” Durant said. “It’s frustrating for myself, but I’m not one of those guys that’s going to walk out of here with my head in my hands because I had 10 turnovers. It’s not the first time I’ve had a lot of turnovers so just gotta be better next game. That’s all it is for me.”

Despite all of that, and some visible frustration from Durant, he hit two mega-important shots to save what would’ve been a really, really, really bad loss.

“That’s what your best player does,” Russell Westbrook said. “He’s not going to play perfect every night. But as you can see, he closed the game for us and did a good job defensively and finished the game for us.”

I made this point in my ESPN.com story, but forgive me, I want to make it again: This is one of those games where it’s kind of about where you’re at. If the Thunder were, say, 14-5 coming in and riding a six-game winning streak, we’d look at this one as a championship level contender making the necessary plays to win a game they probably shouldn’t have. But since the Thunder were 11-8 coming in and had some negativity brewing around them, it feels more like an escape, something that masks the sinister underlying issues the team has.

I just have a hard time saying this team is suddenly not good, but the way they’ve closed games recently certainly doesn’t look familiar. There is just something… off. In this case, it feels less like a big win and more like narrowly dodging disaster. Maybe more like delaying it, if we’re being honest. They have big games ahead and if they don’t build on this, we can look back on it as fool’s gold.

But the opposite of a win is a loss. And a win is better than a loss. Even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.

NOTES:

• Durant: “They wasn’t supposed to beat us or we didn’t get lucky. We took the game.”

• What was really incredible was some of the shots the Kings got in the fourth. Just Wide Ass Open 3s. Like the kind Dion Waiters would inexplicably take a dribble before. The Thunder were often mismatched in transition, just getting completely lost. It was really not very good.

• Really great defensive play by Steven Adams on Rudy Gay to hold off the Kings with OKC up 96-95. Adams took away Gay’s initial drive, funneling him toward Durant who jumped Gay and forced him to lose his handle. Adams grabbed it and OKC was almost home free.

• Big failure by Rajon Rondo (was it Rondo?) to not wrap up Adams before he could call timeout.

• Out of that timeout, the Kings came out with six players on the floor. The officials oddly told them and gave them not one, but two chances to get a player off the court. I found that weird.

• Weird situation in the first half with Serge Ibaka’s fouls. He checked out of the game with two, but was awarded a third while on the bench. The scorekeepers apparently understood an earlier foul to be on Durant, but Marc Davis came over and wanted it changed to Ibaka while he was on the bench. It meant he only played five first half minutes.

• Cameron Payne got some first quarter minutes playing in a pretty wild lineup: Augustin, Waiters, Durant and Kanter. Second possession, defender went under on a screen, and Payne calmly drilled a 3.

• Donovan: “We just have to develop consistency off the bench, if our whole team is going to evolve. We’ve got to be able to hold down the fort.”

• Oh, hey. Westbrook had his third triple-double of the year: 19-11-10. That’s his 22nd of his career, passing Kobe Bryant (21). Only two active players have more: Rajon Rondo (26) and LeBron James (39).

• How about Steven Adams’ hitting Cousins with the killer cross in the open floor? Adams on it: “[I thought] I better pull this off or I’m sitting down.”

• Really odd lineup to start the second quarter: Augustin, Payne, Waiters, Singler and Kanter. They didn’t score a point in the two minutes and nine seconds they played together.

• A lot of the odd lineups, I think, had to do with Ibaka’s foul situation, but maybe that was in the plans.

• I know DeMarcus Cousins is a good player, but he scores very low on the hustle meter. He looked disinterested and disengaged for large portions of the game.

• Man, that second quarter was weird, wasn’t it?

• Donovan staggered lineups a bit leaving Durant on the floor with the second unit to end the first and third quarters, but came out to start the second and fourth with all bench groups. In four minutes and 45 seconds, the non-Durant/Westbrook lineups scored a total of three points, which didn’t include a basket (three free throws). That’s not good. But on the bright side, four minutes and 45 seconds isn’t a lot of gametime without Durant and Westbrook.

• Pregame, I asked Donovan about the all bench lineups and staggering. Here’s how that went: “As I look at it, I think you have to develop your whole entire team. I just think that you can’t expect Russell and Kevin every single night to just keep carrying it. There are going to be some times where those guys aren’t out there, or like in the Miami game where Kevin picked up two fouls in the first quarter, and those guys have had moments where they played really well and moments where they didn’t play so well … I think their develop and their growth will be important.”

• On the big jump in efficiency playing either Westbrook or Durant with the second unit: “I think the biggest thing with those guys is when they start the game, you’re going to have to take one off the floor pretty quickly to get them back in there with the second unit. In talking to Kevin and Russell, they are open minded to it, but sometimes you don’t want to break their rhythm and give them enough time on the floor so in order to do that where you stagger those guys, you’re going to have to take somebody off the floor pretty quickly within the first six minutes and bring them back in back in maybe the end of the first or start of the second. But the one thing you don’t want to do is break their rhythm where they feel like they’re getting pulled in and out of the game and they’re playing short periods. But it’s something that we’ll definitely look into and evolve into. I’m aware of those kind of numbers, but at the same point too, getting some consistency off our bench is important in terms of the long run, in the long haul of being to do that.”

• On if you sit them together, you can play them more together: “There’s a balance there, because you start to stagger those guys and you get down to the end of the game and you look at the amount of time both those guys were on the floor together and it wasn’t as much as it needed to be. Because clearly when those two guys are on the floor they play at a very high level. They complement each other very well. So there’s that balancing act so to speak, of how much time are they separated and then how much time are they together. And sometimes you can have a gameplan to do that, but [matchups] or foul trouble or what’s going on in the game doesn’t allow you to do that.”

Next up: At Memphis on Tuesday