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Tuesday’s Starting Five: five things to consider

1. Breaking the Thunder down by quarter:
The Thunder consistently loses the first three quarters by an average of two to four points every night. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you lose the first, second and third quarters by three points each, you’re trailing by nine heading to the fourth. OKC wins the first only 25 percent of the time, the second 23, the third 28 and the fourth 55. The Thunder is actually one of the top 10 teams in fourth quarter scoring margin (0.4 points). Before you get too excited, I think we know the reason why – when you’re down 15 heading into the quarter, other teams tend to let up and lose focus. But if we’re going to flip it positive, at least that means these guys don’t quit.

2. If you had to guess what the Thunder’s most productive five-man unit was, what would you toss out? Westbrook-Wilkins-Durant-Green-Wilcox? Watson-Westbrook-Durant-Green-Wilcox? That would be my guess. Actually, it’s Westbrook-Mason-Green-Smith-Wilcox. Watson-Westbrook-Durant-Green-Collison actually has a higher win percentage and +/- but they’ve only accounted for 21 minutes. The group of Watson-Durant-Green-Collison-Petro has accounted for the most minutes (119) but has a team worst -50.

3. OKC takes 42 percent of its shots 10 seconds or less into the shot clock.

4. OKC takes 61 percent jump shots and shoots about 38 effective field goal percent on those. For comparison, opponents take 59 percent jumpers on OKC but hit 46.6 percent of them.

5. Position-by-position production:
OKC is getting killed by opponent’s power forwards and centers. The average PER for opposing fours is 19.0 and centers 21.3. The Thunder’s position-by-position PER goes 12.1 for point guard, 16.2 at shooting guard, 11.2 at small forward, 14.8 at power forward and 14.5 at center. By position, the Thunder is being out performed at every position by an average of 4.1.

After looking through those, I really wish we could get a split in the stats for the Scott Brooks era compared to the P.J. Carlesimo one. I wonder how different those would be.