by Steven Adams
MB showed me that move early in my rookie season and we practiced it regularly all season before I was able to try it out in a game. The thing with me is that I only like to take high-percentage shots. Even as a rookie, I had one of the highest field goal percentages in the team because I made sure that the few shots I took were almost always going to go in. When you have stars on your team, it would be foolish to take risky shots because there are so many other options. With that mindset, a new move has to be damn near perfect before I use it in a game.
By the start of the 2015–16 season, I had managed to extend my high-percentage range to include mid-range hooks and floaters. But what I knew would be most helpful to our stacked team was to be a force on defense and on the boards. Every game and every practice I worked on my off-ball work—countering a box-out, predicting shots, and shutting down open space. It was all stuff that wasn’t exactly new but took a lot of court time to fully learn. I also felt I was finally comfortable reading other teams’ systems and knowing their strengths and weaknesses.
We started off a bit slow, ending up on 11–7 by the end of November. We weren’t worried, though. We had a new coach and a fresh, fitter team compared to the last season, so we were just warming up.
By the end of the year we were 23–10. We were gaining momentum and I was developing a pretty sweet pick-and-roll chemistry with Russ. He had told me right from the beginning, “If I’m driving to the hoop, I’m looking for you, so be ready.” While he meant it in 2013, I wasn’t always ready. But after two years of toughening up my screens and working on my above-the-rim work, our pick-and-rolls were looking good.
Alley-oop dunks aren’t necessarily harder than any other shot in the game, they’re just not as common, which means you’ve got to practice them. Leaving the ground, catching the ball, finding the hoop, and dunking it before you land is a lot of stuff to think about. If you’ve ever played that game where you try to catch a pass as you are jumping into a swimming pool, you’ll know how easy it is to get wrong. But after a couple of hundred games spent on the same court with the same hoops, knowing where you are in relation to the basket becomes a sixth sense.
As soon as I got my first alley-oop off Russ’s pass I realized that it was in fact a high-percentage look. His passing is pinpoint and almost impossible to defend against so all I had to do was make sure I got up to guide the ball to the basket. Easy as.
It’s funny how it’s those pick-and-roll alley-oops that always end up on the highlight reels when most of the time it’s the contested rebounds and putbacks that are the toughest shots to execute. Too bad they never get put on a poster.
The most important difference for us at the end of the season was that the workload was being distributed evenly, or at least more so than in past seasons. In one of our last games, we came up against Enes’s old team, the Jazz. I could tell he was nervous because he couldn’t seem to do anything the whole first half he was so hyped up. As we came out for the second half I pulled him aside and told him, mustached man to mustached man, to just breathe. Now I’m not trying to say that I’m the Enes whisperer, but he went out and dropped 16 in the second half. Six of us scored in double figures that game, a stark contrast to the 2014 playoffs when six Spurs did that and only three of our guys. Even though we were ranked third in the Western Conference, it felt like 2016 would be the year we became NBA Champions.
There was no point trying to finish at the top of the Western Conference table. That spot belonged to the Warriors before the season was even half over. They were the defending champions and had started the season with a 24–0 run. They finished the regular season 73–9, a new NBA record for the most regular-season wins. We played them three times in the regular season and lost to them three times.
At the end of March, we were well positioned in the top four and had little risk of finishing below that by the end of the season. We ended the season a bit shaky, but when you know you are into the playoffs safely, and there’s no chance of moving up or down the ladder, it’s easy to take your foot off the pedal and start looking ahead to the first playoff series.
I thought I had won the game for us. Imagine that, a buzzer-beater to win a game in the playoffs. It was game two of the series against my old mate Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks, and I got a tip-in basket right on the buzzer to put us up by one. Or so I thought.
Even though we were the higher seed, a lot of pundits had picked us to bow out in the first round because of our below-average end run in the regular season. We never paid attention to them to begin with, but it was interesting to see that people thought so little of our potential to win the whole thing. We planned to get in, win it in four, then get out. Why wouldn’t we?
It started well at home with a 37-point win. It was my first playoff start and a good one for me to get used to playing at that intensity for twice as many minutes as the previous playoff series I was in. None of us had a spectacular game; we just all played well together, which was even better. I’d noticed that while all my stats were going up—minutes, points, rebounds—my block numbers were going down. And that’s because I was learning how to make the stops before a block was required. Nick had been working with me a lot that season, helping me read movements on the court and shut down a shot before it’s even in motion. The block tally was actually a stat I was happy to see go down.
After the whipping we dished out in game one, we should have done exactly the same thing in game two. But, as all good NBA teams do, the Mavericks figured out what we liked and adjusted to counter it—meaning they slowed the game right down. They managed to bring the pace of the game practically down to a walk and it threw us out of whack. We looked okay on transition, because that was our strength, but everything was practically the opposite of game one.
Nobody seemed to be able to do anything on our team. Our shooting was trash while the Mavs’ point guard Raymond Felton embarrassed us by getting 21 points and 14 rebounds. It’s a Loss with a capital L when a 6 1 point guard drives to the basket and scores a layup over your 7-foot self. After scoring 108 in game one, trailing 85–84 with seven seconds to go seemed ridiculous. But after shooting two from 15 field goals in the final five minutes, we should have been losing by a lot more.
Felton was shooting two free throws with 7.1 seconds on the clock and a one-point lead. If he made both, we needed to set up KD or Russ for a three to tie the game. If he made one, well, we had some options. And if he missed both, we just had to transition like we knew how and go for a layup to win. He missed both.
KD got the rebound and headed down the court before passing ahead to Russ. I turned and sprinted, but they were the two quickest guys on the court and had the two lanes covered so I made sure to at least block Felton’s way at the top of the key. Russ drove down the middle towards three defenders and dished to KD who went up for the layup. It was tipped by someone and missed. Russ tapped it back and that also missed. I grabbed the ball as it fell and, as quick as I could, tipped it back into the hoop as the buzzer went. The ball dropped through the net and I thought I had won the game for us.
The whole stadium thought we had won. The bench swarmed the court and mobbed me. The score read OKC 86–DAL 85. But when the refs reviewed the play and the slow-mo went up on the jumbotron, it was hard to argue. The ball definitely looked like it was still touching my hand when the clock ran out. I’d say there was less than 0.1 second in it. But 0.1 second doesn’t matter when there were a hundred different things that could have won the game for us if we had executed correctly. That’s the thing with playoff basketball, you can’t afford to let your focus drift for even a second because every play could be the play that wins or loses the game for you. And every game could be the game that wins or loses a series.
As soon as the call was overturned and the scoreboard returned to displaying a Mavs win, I thanked the refs and headed straight for the locker room. We had work to do. We weren’t going to win a championship playing like that.
Our wake-up call at
our home arena worked. We went to Dallas with something to prove, and we proved it by rolling them at home, 131–102.
In game four we made sure not to get complacent again and won by 11, never once giving up the lead throughout the whole game. Heading home for game five we knew we had to end the series there to give us a decent rest before the second round.
There is a huge difference between playing five games with five days’ rest between series and playing seven games with two days’ rest. The memory of our last game at home was still fresh and we had to erase it with a big win. So we did. We won by 16 in a fairly one-sided match. I played my best game of the series with 15 points and 10 rebounds, and I hoped to keep building from there and into the next series against our dreaded friendly foes, the Spurs.
Whatever momentum we thought we had going into the series was quickly stopped by the second-seeded Spurs. They were heavy favorites after finishing the regular season with 67 wins. If the Warriors hadn’t broken seemingly every NBA record under the sun that year, everyone would have been talking about what a crazy regular season the Spurs had. The Cavaliers, who dominated the Eastern Conference, had only 55 wins, the same as us who were third place in the West. The Spurs’ squad still had all the veterans but had added LaMarcus Aldridge. In four playoff meetings, the Thunder had never won a series against the Spurs.
After one game we hadn’t convinced anyone that we were about to break tradition. Playing in San Antonio, it took only one quarter for them to remind us why they were one of the greats. They outscored us 43–20 in the first quarter, something that had never happened to us before. And it didn’t get any better.
Aldridge and Kawhi Leonard were on fire, and when those two were on fire at the same time they were near unstoppable. We lost by 32 points, at one stage trailing by 43. It was embarrassing but, again, it was one game. And it was the first game at that. We still had a long way to go in the series and plenty of time to regroup.
In game two we did exactly what Dallas had done to us in game two a fortnight earlier. We came back when nobody expected it, contested one of the most exciting games of the playoffs, and won by one in front of their home crowd. And just like our game two against Dallas, the final moments were a shambles that led to a lot of complaining on both sides of the court. I wasn’t complaining. We won and I had a good double-double with 12 points and 17 rebounds.
We gave the Spurs plenty of chances to win, particularly when we stuffed up an inbound pass with 13 seconds to go. I ended up defending a three-on-one situation, and that’s when your balls are tested. Deciding which way to go—whether to hedge or drop back—needs to be done in a split second. I made the right decision (well, we won so it can’t have been that wrong) and the Spurs were allowed only one final shot.
Patty Mills took it—a corner three—and I sprinted out to him and lunged at his shot, tipping it so it fell short. My momentum carried me into the front row, but I’d had no time to check my surroundings. There were still two seconds on the clock.
When I turned around to rush back into play, a hand was on my forearm, holding me back. I yanked my arm away from the fan as the buzzer went. When I turned to see who it was that was about to get a hiding, I saw it was a woman. Call me sexist, but I assumed she must have been trying to keep her balance and grabbed whatever was in front of her, which was my arm. This might not be true; she might have been deliberately keeping me out of the play to help her team. But at that point we had won, so I stopped caring what her motives were.
Game three, our first at home, went to the Spurs after a lackluster effort from us. I played 41 minutes but put up only one shot. The ball just wasn’t moving a lot and we weren’t executing our plays how they were intended: 2–1 to the Spurs.
We had a chance to redeem ourselves at home on Mother’s Day and we took it. I had learned a lot in the two years since I’d last matched up with Tim Duncan in the playoffs. At the very least, I wasn’t going to fall for his kind of trash talk again. Instead, something incredible happened. He started the game but only played 12 minutes—and in those 12 minutes he didn’t shoot at all. I found out after the game that was the first time in his entire career that he hadn’t taken a single shot. He might have been tired, he might have been sick, but I had been working hard on my defense and it felt good to be able to shut down someone like Duncan, even for 12 minutes. After a terrible first quarter, we fought back to win 111–97, and I equaled my playoffs career high of 16 points. It was a good game.
Heading back to San Antonio, we were well aware that they had lost only one game at home the whole regular season. But our last game in their home stadium was a win to us, so we felt like we held the advantage. We led for the first half and then kind of crumbled and gave them the lead for most of the second half. But it doesn’t matter who leads for the whole game, what’s important is who is leading when that final buzzer sounds. We won 95–91 to take the lead in the series and have a chance at finishing it at home.
In the last tip-off of Tim Duncan’s NBA career, we both missed the ball. I didn’t know it was his last game because I didn’t know who was going to win, or even that he was planning to announce his retirement in the off-season.
I had had a migraine before the game, but no way was I going to sit out a playoff match. The medical team pumped me with fluids and pain meds and I made it out in time to warm up.
It should have been a blowout. We were up by 28 but let them go on a run in the fourth quarter and get back to within 10. Dre and I actually came through for our team and it was maybe the first game we showed fans that both of us were going to be Thunder staples in years to come.
After being somewhat quiet the whole series, Tim Duncan came to life in that last game and scored 19 points. I got 15, in what felt like the first and last time that I truly matched up with him. We scrapped the whole game, right down to the last few plays as we led by over 10 points. It was an honor and a privilege to be the great Tim Duncan’s final opponent. What a legend.
We went into the series against the Spurs as heavy underdogs after they had one of the best regular seasons in recent history. For us to win in six was the perfect warm-up to play the team that had just had the best regular season in history. We were heading to the conference finals to play the formidable Warriors.
15.
SAY A PRAYER FOR MY TESTICLES
People say I have a face that’s easy to punch. And balls that are easy to kick. It’s hard to argue when you’re sitting in the locker room with ice on your nuts.
The 2016 conference finals against the Warriors was when I became a household name in America. Unfortunately, the reason I became a household name wasn’t my stellar play but because I got kicked in the nuts by Draymond Green. Twice. Let me explain.
The Warriors were the favorites, no matter how you looked at it. They were reigning champions, had just broken the record for most wins in a regular season, and they looked unstoppable. They were basically the Spurs if everyone on the Spurs was a perimeter shooter.
For almost every opponent in the NBA, you keep the same game plan. There might be tweaks depending on what systems they run, but it’s pretty much the same.
The 2016 Warriors were the first team that required a complete overhaul in our approach. They didn’t play a variation of the same game like everyone else, they played something new and faster, with more ball movement and a stupidly high field-goal percentage. They played small ball, the smallest ball in the league. We were the aggressors, the big, hulking, number-one rebounding team in the regular season.
Even before it began, people knew it would be a series to remember.
Game one at Golden State
It started out shit. We couldn’t seem to make a shot and somehow neither could the Warriors. It took a good four minutes before either side could settle into a rhythm. Russ was getting beaten up. He went down hard on the first play of the game and then caught an elbow to the face from Andrew Bogut going up for a rebound. The Warriors might have been the small
team in the match-up, but they had Bogut and Draymond Green, two guys known for their physical play.
I enjoyed going up against Bogut. We both liked to annoy our opponents and were able to take a lot of contact from each other without the refs getting involved. I took a knock to my nose early in the second quarter and it bled. Any blood means you are subbed off until it stops, but I wasn’t ready to quit yet so we stuffed some cotton up my left nostril and back out I went. By then, a bleeding nostril was the least of my worries. My injured hand had flared up again.
It looked like nothing. Bogut had the ball at the top of the key and my right hand was on him as a block. When he swung around to pass, the movement in his arm tweaked my thumb and a pain worse than almost anything I had felt shot through my hand and up my arm. The original injury had happened 15 months earlier but was still causing me problems. For the rest of the game, my right hand was swollen and trembling uncontrollably. I did my best to ignore it.
Ignoring pain is quite easy once you get your mind into the game. Everything else—the crowd, the noise, any niggles you have—disappears. All you think about is the next play. It’s in the pauses, the free throws, the play reviews, the time on the bench that the pain suddenly rushes back into focus.
We knew that first game would be crucial in slowing the Warriors’ momentum. We had lost all three of our regular-season games against them, so we had to get a win now. I was doing what I could with my bung hand, but getting blocked by Draymond didn’t help things. He threw it down to Klay Thompson for a fast break layup and Klay was blocked even harder by Serge. That’s how you avenge your teammates.
KD shot a three to tie the game at the start of the fourth quarter. With four minutes to go we were in the lead, but we still had a lot of work to do. People loved to talk about how often we let leads go in the last five minutes during the regular-season. We hadn’t done it in the playoffs yet, but it was a hard trend to ignore.