On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Lakers played the Oklahoma City Thunder. Despite what the final score suggests, the game was actually pretty close down the stretch. One of the best players in the NBA today, Kobe Bryant went toe-to-toe with Kevin Durant, one of the nation's rising young stars. Durant is in hot pursuit of the record for most 30+ point games by a player before hitting the age of 21. The current holder of this title? A little known guy by the name of LeBron James.
Currently Durant is one of the league's top five scorers in the nation, and on Tuesday all five of them were in action, yet Durant is the only one to be on the losing side that night. Ever since the Thunder lost to the Lakers earlier in 2009, they have been in a slump and have yet to recapture the energy they had after they beat Golden State on New Year's Eve.
The team is young right now. how young? The average amount of NBA experience for the team is 4.7 years. Keep in mind that three of the players are rookies, and that the team's three best players, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Jeff Green, have a combined NBA experience of just 2 years. Durant and Green were rookies last year, and Westbrook is a rookie this year. The reason I bring up how young this team is, is because it is a key reason to why the team only has 13 wins right now. It is because of this lack of experience that the team just can't seem to finish out games. The majority of their defeats have come by 6 or less points, and a good chunk of those losses have come either by last second shots, or because the team blew a huge third quarter or early fourth quarter lead.
As for the future of this team, what the team really needs in another great big man to help rebound and assist around the basket. The team needs a guy to help compliment Nenad Krstic. The Thunder could theoretically get that much needed big man in the draft this off season. Either Oklahoma's Blake Griffin or UCONN's Hasheem Thabeet will greatly fill this need. However, I'm pretty sure the Thunder will try for Griffin over Thabeet if they could. Griffin has more presence around the board than Thabeet does, and come on, you can't argue with how easy it would be to market Blake Griffin in Oklahoma, he is, afterall, the main star of one of the state's two biggest universities. The team is young and has a few holes on the team that they need to fill, but give the team a couple of years, and who knows where they can go.
