Thunder Derangement Syndrome

There’s Good and Evil on Both Sides of This Series

I’m no deep-in-the-weeds Game of Thrones expert, but I’m a connoisseur of the show’s best trailers. My favorite is this promotion of Season 4, titled, “The War is Not Won.”

My top quote from this beautiful trailer comes courtesy of Jorah Mormont:

It’s tempting to see your enemies as evil. But there’s good and evil on both sides in every war.

Ever since I heard that line I thought back to it in every hotly contested NBA playoff series I watched thereafter. Emotions run high in these series and so many different characters are attempting to scratch out an advantage. Your confirmation bias is set to noticing the enemy’s flops and uncalled fouls. Your side’s transgressions aren’t so clear. This is war.

If you’re fully on one side, it can be easy to see your team’s triumph as important for the purity of basketball. I’m not just talking about fans, either. People on these teams can become convinced of this. When I covered the Warriors, I can tell you that they saw their brand of basketball as what should, for the sake of justice, prevail over James Harden Houston Rockets Moreyball.

This week I mentioned that I am rooting for the Thunder in this series. I’d just rather be honest than maintain the pretense of total objectivity. I don’t root OKC with any great fervor. I don’t believe that the Thunder is (are?) morally superior to the Spurs, but I, a perverse contrarian, am mostly responding to the emergent Internet sentiment that they’re morally inferior.

The Thunder are supposedly history’s greatest cheaters, but they ranked 17th in free throws per game this season. I’m not saying they aren’t grabby on defense, because they’re pretty grabby on defense. I’m just saying that, if this squad flops the most of anybody, and gets more ref deference than anyone, there’d probably be a statistical footprint suggesting as much. But there isn’t, which informs why I’m open to the argument made by NBA Youtuber Carson Breber:

People choosing to focus on officiating instead of that incredible basketball game have OKC-induced madness. Wemby is getting held like crazy. Shai is getting held like crazy. This is playoff basketball. It's physical, especially off-ball, and you play through it. That's it.

TDS (Thunder Derangement Syndrome) isn’t the reaction to a wholly innocent team. The Thunder certainly have their Lu Dort Draymond moments and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander really does fall on many of his drives. I also believe that the negative focus on this team has more to do with a reaction to their recent success than a significant difference from how other squads operate.

In this context, a lot of people are watching the Western Conference Finals with great interest. This series reads more like the pre-parity NBA era, when juggernauts battled over grander NBA legacy stakes. Watching this, I feel transported back to a decade ago, when the Warriors fought off Kevin Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder over the course of 7 games.

With great interest, though, comes a lot of emotionally charged Zapruder film analysis. A decade ago, we actually didn’t have as many Twitter video sleuths and clip-economy fodder. We’d argue over the big slow motion events, like when Draymond Green kicked Steven Adams in the nuts, but we weren’t often having emotionally charged conversations about the equivalent of minor mid game moments like Isaiah Joe ragdolling himself past Harrison Barnes.

That play has generated a lot of online heat, furthering the now popular narrative of Oklahoma City Thunder chiseling. There’s 3.6 million views, not that I fully believe the X view counter, on a Laker fan’s clip of this titled, “OKC is just SHAMELESS.”

Maybe the Thunder are shameless, but I’d cite this instance as one of narrative framing the facts. Harrison Barnes was called for fouling Joe, which wasn’t fair to HB, because the contact was incidental. At the same time, I don’t think the Joe flail was quite the extreme acting job that the popular reaction to it suggests. In the play, Barnes steps back simultaneous with Joe lurching forward, and Joe’s legs clip HB’s, unmooring the former’s footing. You can actually hear the sound of them getting tangled in the audio, which makes me wonder if NBC has especially impressive in-game microphones.

I’m not going to go over every other clip that’s been submitted for emotionally charged reaction. Yes, Isaiah Hartenstein was grabbing Victor Wembanyama a lot and the refs should call that tighter. Hartenstein also blindly snagged Stephon Castle’s impressive hair tower, and I understand why Spurs fans would be angry about that.

I also think that, after you tally up the injuries between these sides, the Thunder simply outplayed the Spurs in Game 2. We can argue about SGA flopping, but he had only six free throw attempts. Whatever’s supposedly bad about SGA was less pertinent to the result than what’s great about him. After a lot of hoopla over Wembanyama being Hakeem to Gilgeous-Alexander’s David Robinson, Wemby faded down the stretch and SGA didn’t. Perhaps that should be more of the narrative than “OMG SGA flopped!”

Speaking of Wemby, he finds the floor a lot as well, such as on this sequence when he dove into Gilgeous-Alexander’s legs. I happen to think that this dangerous play was accidental, but I also believe that, if roles were reversed, it’d be a much bigger talking point. Right now, and this is all subject to change, the SGA/Thunder brand is more negative than the Wembanyama/Spurs brand. Wemby can wind up elbow Naz Reid in the face and the TV broadcast frames the incident in a sympathetic light.

My point isn’t that the Spurs are less ethical or more annoying than the Thunder. If you hate OKC that’s certainly your right as a basketball fan. Instead what I’m saying is, simply:

It’s tempting to see your enemies as evil. But there’s good and evil on both sides in every war.

And right now, the defending champions are viewed by more as enemy than the challenger.