Thunder fool themselves against the Clippers, 103-98
Kevin Durant: “Hate losing like that. They made plays; we didn’t. They were disciplined; we weren’t. We want to be a great team, we’re fooling ourselves. If we just want to be a great team the way we’re playing, we’re fooling ourselves. We want to win a bunch of games in the regular season, that’s cool, but we’re fooling ourselves with the way we’re playing.”
Billy Donovan: “I think the biggest think is, the decision we have to make collectively as a group from an accountability standpoint is, what kind of team do we want to be? Because in order to do that there has to be a high level of sacrifice by everybody. This is something where you see in the first half what this team is capable of and then can you sustain that? Can you keep playing that way? Can you keep playing the right way and doing the right things? And they do it. They do it for long stretches of times in games, but then you have these lapses where our defense nor offense was existent in the second half.”
Durant: “There’s just no discipline. Playing too loose. Playing too loose. We’ve got to be better. The good thing about this league, we play tomorrow.”
Donovan: “We didn’t really play the right way on offense. And I thought it totally bled into our defense. We got stagnant and turned the ball over.”
Durant: “You just go put it behind you, simple as that. We play tomorrow. I’m sure coach is going to want to put in the film and all of this, and talk about this and talk about that. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to dig down deep and stay disciplined, man. Throughout the whole game. And that’s from the top to the bottom. Everybody. From the bench to the coaches to the players, everybody. We’ve just got to stick together and stay disciplined.”
Donovan: “Did we beat ourselves, or did they beat us?”
Durant: “We lost a few games. Lost some tough ones. But at the end of the day we’re playing basketball, something we love to do every single day. When you look at it like that it’s not as tough as you think. But losing does suck. And we hate losing. But at the end of the day we’re still in a good spot. We’ve just got to climb out of where we’re at right now.”
Donovan: “I’m not frustrated at all. I’m not. I feel bad for those guys because there’s a great group of guys in that locker room and they work hard and it gets to a point where you’ve really be able to do is drop and block out everything and focus on the next possession and what needs to be done collectively as a group. That’s a decision those guys have gotta make, you know what I mean? As a group. I think that’s the challenge. I’ve said this before, I think the best thing for this team is adversity. It needs adversity. It doesn’t need to be easy, in my opinion. For it to be as good as it can be. And here’s an adverse situation, what do we do from this going forward when we get leads like this. Can we actually sustain playing the right way on offense and defense.”
Donovan: “You get intoxicated by winning and you fail to realize the slippage in things that’s going on. When you get into these situations, most times, we would probably win a game like this doing what we did in the fourth quarter. Maybe it wouldn’t have been by 20, but we win by five or six or close it out in the end and nobody talks about it. But right now for us, I think the biggest thing is getting exposed and shining a light like there is tonight so to a point we have to make a decision of what we want to do.”
Durant: “Man, we’ve supposed to be having wake-up calls. We’ve already lost too many games we’re supposed to win. We can’t just keep talking about wake-up calls. We’ve got 20 games left. We can’t have no wake-up calls at the end of the season. We’ve supposed to been had those. We’ve just got to be locked in from the beginning, from shootaround. You’ve got think about the game of basketball, you’ve got to think about what you’re going to do tonight from shootaround all the way to the end of the game. And if you don’t do that then talent is going to take over sometimes but more times than not, the better teams are going to take advantage of that.”
Donovan: “This is great for our team. This is great. They need to keep coming. This is great, just to keep playing a competitive schedule like this and have to pick yourself and come back out there again against the best team in the league right now.”
The Thunder play the Warriors in less than 24 hours.
NOTES:
- Every note I had was pre-collapse. They all feel so worthless now.
Next up: At the Warriors on Thursday