Oklahoma City • Russell Westbrook, looking resplendent in his postgame dark threads and shades, put it modestly when he said of him and his teammates: “We played off of each other very, very well.”
That, the Oklahoma City Thunder did in Game 5 of the Jazz-OKC playoff series on Wednesday night, which stands now at 3-2, Utah.
But they also counted on extraordinary talent — much of it Westbrook’s — to overcome deficiencies most teams could not have conquered.
The Thunder were brilliant — at least for 20 minutes — against the Jazz, in a game they ended up winning, 107-99.
Over the first 28 minutes, if that’s all anybody had seen, anybody wouldn’t have believed the Jazz could lose this contest. It was that lopsided.
In the first quarter, Utah outscored OKC by five, but shot 12 percentage points better, out-boarded them, out-assisted them, and out-defended them. By halftime, the count stood at Jazz 56, Thunder 41. And you had to feel sorry for the well-on-its-way-to-being-eliminated home team.
Just before the eight-minute mark of the third quarter, the Jazz were up 25 points.
And then … and then, the Thunder started doing what Westbrook said they did. They also started making all the shots they had not made in this first-round playoff series since Game 1.
Westbrook went for 45 points. Paul George went for 34.
And the Jazz sagged.
“Well,” Jazz coach Quin Snyder said, “I think a 25-point lead in the NBA is not safe, especially when you’ve got two guys like Russell and Paul George that can do what they did. I thought the two 3’s that Westbrook hit [in the third quarter] were big shots, and then Paul George followed up with a 3-point play, and all of a sudden a 25-point lead is a 16-point lead, and they found some rhythm.”
They found victory.
OKC coach Billy Donovan said it this way: “It took a lot of toughness, a lot of resiliency, especially being down 3-1, to keep fighting and find a way at the end of the third to be right there in the game. …
“We kept playing. I think the biggest thing is we had too many breakdowns defensively, and I thought in the second half, we had very, very few. … Our guys just kept battling. … I thought Russell and Paul generated a lot of life for our team.”
