Practice Report: Tinkering
Less than a week to go for the Thunder until the games count. And with the preseason games done, they’re back at practice basically kicking off a second training camp.
Nothing too interesting to report, although Kevin Durant did talk some about hockey at the end of his availability. So there’s that.
KEVIN DURANT
On 16 of the first 24 games being at home: “They are, especially taking care of home court. That’s something very important to us. So we’ve just got to capitalize on that but we’ve just got to take it one game at a time so we’ll see what happens.”
On Serge Ibaka’s improved offensive game: “That’s nothing new to us. He always played offense it’s just a matter of us putting him in the right position and giving him the ball. We always knew he could play and shoot and he could make moves but it’s just about us giving him the ball. So it’s nothing new.”
SCOTT BROOKS
On using the corner and the “dunker” spot: “Those are the two most important parts of our spacing. When we can get our guys in the deep corner we’re a much better shooting team. The stats prove it, it’s not me making things up. And we’re also good when we get the ball to what we call the dunker spot, the lower hash mark, when we can get our backs to the baseline and be ready to catch and finish with one or two big steps we’re really good. We have some players that have really improved in that area and they will continue to improve. We spend a lot of time on it. We spend 10 to 15 minutes after practice working on those spots alone.”
On a zone: “We still have six days of training camp. We will do it every now and then. Yeah, we will … We will spend a fair amount of time but we won’t spend a lot of time because that’s not going to be a staple. That will be something we throw out as a change of pace, just a wrinkle that we will throw with our defense. But we are a man-to-man team. When we play our best man-to-man we’re really playing a good zone. But we will definitely tinker in some zone this year.”