Daily Thunder.com

Darnell Mayberry: “Pump your brakes if you’re going bananas. But by all means pay attention to whether the Thunder is sustaining the level of play it has set out to this season. And over the past three weeks, not even the biggest optimist can claim that’s been the case. Oklahoma City is just 3-3 in its past six games. But even those wins, and a few victories before them, the Thunder had significant trouble stringing together four quarters of quality basketball.”

Very interesting stuff from Henry Abbott of TrueHoop on Steve Novak’s defense: “What Synergy does, and what most NBA teams pay mightily for, is employ an army of people to watch every second of hoops in the NBA and other leagues and categorize every single play various ways — for instance, as a spot-up, isolation or pick-and-roll. Then those plays are fed into an ever-changing database where you can look up all kinds of things that were never available any other way. Statistics aren’t the final word in much of anything in basketball, especially when it comes to defense, which is really not well-converted into numbers anywhere. Any individual defensive ratings are guaranteed, at this point in history, to miss a lot.” Keep Reading…

Darnell Mayberry on how bananas you should be: “I’m not saying go bananas. I’d never say do that. But the Thunder hasn’t exactly played well lately. You can say OKC is 24-7 and yada yada ya. But the fact of the matter is this team has had some extremely disturbing stretches, periods or halves. This team is good enough to win on most nights, and that’s precisely what it’s done for the most part. But believe me, what we’re watching right in no way is the identity this team wants to have. There’s too much inconsistency. Too many breakdowns. This team’s goal this season and beyond is to sustain a level of performance, against good teams and bad, and right now that just isn’t happening.”

Rob Mahoney of SI.com lists Serge Ibaka as one of his most improved: “If Kendrick Perkins is to blame for the Thunder’s overly conventional lineups with two court-clogging big men, Ibaka could rightly be credited for some of the team’s push-back solvency. If nothing else, Perkins’ very presence has forced Ibaka to stretch his game over the past few seasons, and this season we’ve begun to see the considerable payoff from that evolution.” Keep Reading…