Thunder leaders Daigneault and Gilgeous-Alexander reveal their thoughts on the heated game and ensuing on-court tensions with the Nuggets.
The Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Denver Nuggets on Friday night in what was an instant classic overtime battle between arguably the two best teams and the two best players in basketball.
Unfortunately, it seems nobody is actually talking about it.
Instead, the full focus of online discourse is focused on the Lu Dort flagrant 2 foul in which he appeared to trip Nikola Jokic and the ensuing dust up that also included Jaylin Williams. While most of us have probably read hundreds of social media opinions on the matter, I thought it would appropriate to to hear what the Thunder had to say on the matter.
"If you were watching the game, I think you could see very clearly, very early that that was a chippy game," OKC head coach Mark Daigneault said postgame. "These are two teams that played each other in a seven game series. We're in the same division. We've played each other a hundred times. You know, they know our playbook. We know their playbook. It's just what it is. Like I said, it's going to be uh an imperfect game. And things get, you know, they escalate like that sometimes. I know Lu, I know Jokic. I know JWill. I don't think anybody's trying to hurt anybody. They're just great competitors. And I thought it just boiled over. I think it was nothing more than that."
Daigneault did have one addendum, though.
"I will say this. If a player gets, if JWill is running up the floor and gets tripped, we expect a flagrant 2 from this point forward. You know, that's all," Daigneault said. "You know, if that's the precedent, if that becomes a malicious play and flagrant 2 is the line in the sand on that, we would expect that if it's JWill. We would expect that if it's anybody. And if that's the case, we're good."
Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander felt the scuffles stemmed simply from two great teams playing hard.
"It was great, the physicality. Two teams wanted to win really badly and they were going at it," Gilgeous-Alexander said postgame. "They're obviously a high level team. We're a high level team. And we've seen each other a lot in the past couple years. So it might be a little bit more into the games cause we know the opponent. But yeah, it was fun. It was good out there. End of season basketball is like that. It's that chippy. It's that physical. So, it was good to get one of those in regular season. It's how it usually goes. Something happens, a team roars, the other team roars. I don't know. Lu got thrown out. Lu's not that type of guy. Lu's trying to go out there and win. I didn't see what happened. But yeah, it's all good."