In the opening game of the season, on Oct. 20, a Thunder team lacking in the experience department went to Salt Lake City and took some lumps from the Utah Jazz, the reigning number one seed in the Western Conference.
In the second half of that game, head coach Mark Daigneault pressed a different button, using rookie Jeremiah Robinson-Earl as a pick-and-pop center to burn Utah’s rim-protecting center Rudy Gobert a couple times on 3-pointers from the top of the key. The buckets didn’t change the final outcome, a 107-86 Thunder loss, but fast forward to Wednesday night’s rematch and Daigneault was using information gleaned from game number one as a primer for game number 18.