Over the past week, the Oklahoma City Thunder had to encounter a few growing pains on their road to becoming one of the most feared teams in the association. This past Friday night, the Thunder suffered a dispiriting loss to the Brooklyn Nets in which they went down by as many as 32 points. But the Thunder had a golden opportunity to get back to winning ways as they took on the Washington Wizards on Monday night.
The Wizards, surprisingly, kept the game close. Six players of theirs scored in double figures in what was a high-octane affair. In the end, it was the Thunder that took home the victory, 136-128, thanks in large part to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren's 32 and 31 points, respectively.
Those two stars, however, did not carry the team on their own. They had plenty of help from the likes of Jalen Williams, who had 21 points, seven rebounds, and 10 assists, while Josh Giddey added nine assists of his own. This is the story of what makes the Thunder quite the difficult team to stop — they have so many weapons who can make the right reads on either end of the floor.
“Everybody's trying to make the right play out there and still be aggressive within that. There's a tipping point where you're trying to make too many right plays and you're not out there playing with force. We're doing a good job right now of balancing those two things,” Holmgren said, per Nick Gallo of Bally Sports Oklahoma.
This is a tricky thing to learn for a young team; due to the plethora of weapons the Thunder have, it might be a tendency for some to press the issue whenever they have the basketball. But there seems to be strong cohesion among the team's rotation players. They are strengthening their mind-meld with one another, learning which play to make as they grow even more accustomed to each other's tendencies on the hardwood.
Controlled aggression is what makes Chet Holmgren and company so hard to beat, and moving forward, they'll become an even more unstoppable force. They now head south on their two-game road trip as they take on the Miami Heat on Wednesday night.