Do the Thunder really force defenses to change their usual tactics?

We can actually measure this!

Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images

A couple weeks back, I saw a quote from Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault that really intrigued me. Daigneault was asked about how opponents had been defending his squad lately, sagging off of certain players and aggressively hounding others and just generally doing all kinds of weird stuff in an attempt to strangle OKC’s halfcourt offense.

Daigneault went on a bit of a soliloquy in response, but the two parts of his answer that interested me the most were as follows:

"I look at it as, it's a compliment to our offense that we're seeing that now. And in the last four games, Minnesota — we score 60 points on the best half-court defense in the league, they zone us in the second half. Could've handled it better. Dallas, we're up by 20, they start double-teaming all over the place. Could've handled it better. Last night, cross-match onto Josh [Giddey], switch with Chet [Holmgren]. Could've handled it better. But those are, to me that's like the natural course that you have to go through. You have to go through those struggles to evolve."

—

“It’s the first time that we’ve had a good enough offense that we’re seeing the kitchen sink. And now that we’re seeing the kitchen sink, we have to improve.”

You can see the entire answer here:

(via Rylan Stiles of Locked on Thunder)

Naturally, I got curious. Are teams actually throwing the kitchen sink at the Thunder defensively? Are they actually junking their standard defensive scheme more often against OKC than they do against other opponents? Luckily, that’s something that can actually be measured these days.

To do this, we can turn to a pair of metrics Krishna Narsu and I introduced at FiveThirtyEight back in 2020: Aggression+ and Variance+.

Aggression+ measures how much more often than the league average team a defense sends extra defenders toward whatever action the offense runs. (If a team’s Aggression+ is 120, they do so 20% more often. If it’s 80, they do so 20% less often than average.) Variance+ how much more or less often the team changes its Aggression+ from game to game.

OKC is seeing some of the most aggressive opposing defenses in recent memory. The player-tracking era only goes back to the 2013-14 season, but the Thunder have seen he 25th-most aggressive defenses out of the 330 team-seasons during that span. Only two teams this season (the Mavericks and Celtics) have seen opponents utilize more aggressive schemes. With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at the controls, it’s not surprising. Teams tend to be the most aggressive against the very best offensive engines, and Shai has blossomed into exactly that type of player.

The Thunder interestingly don’t rank all that highly in Variance+, but the standard version of Variance+ only tells us how often the Thunder face different schemes on a game-to-game basis. What we’re looking for here is how often teams divert from their own defensive strategy when playing OKC. And there, the Thunder are again near the top of the charts.

As you can see above, this season’s Thunder check in 23rd out of the 330 teams during the player-tracking era, in terms of how often opposing teams deviate from their own defensive strategies against them. (They’re changing 2.17% more often against OKC than against a league-average opponent.) Only three teams (the aforementioned Mavericks and Celtics, plus the Warriors) are forcing defenses to abandon their typical scheme more often. In other words: Daigneault is right. The Thunder are indeed seeing the kitchen sink. The data bears that out.

It’s also interesting that Golden State is one of the teams ahead of the Thunder, and unsurprising that the Warriors actually account for an incredible eight of the top 22 seasons on this list. Because again, Daigneault used the Warriors as a teaching point for how his team can learn from what it’s seeing right now:

“Golden State gets switched, Golden State gets blitzed, Golden State gets switched off-ball, they stay with their own off-ball. And they’ve developed all these tricks against all these different things, where it’s like, no matter what you throw at them now, it’s all familiar. The point of that is they haven’t just hatched into that. This isn’t where they started.

They started with success a certain way. Then they probably struggled their butts off for a long time. With the adaptations they were seeing, they had to clear those hurdles. It forced them to evolve, and then they got better.

And then they get to a point where they were almost unbreakable. Because not only were they good with Plan A, but when you went to Plan B and C against them, they had solutions. We need to develop the solutions. But I look at the fact that three of our last four opponents have gone to something that’s totally non-conventional for them, as a compliment to our offense.”

Now, Daigneault is wrong that the Warriors struggled their butts off for a long time. We all watched those games and we know that didn’t actually happen. (At least in part because they added Kevin Durant from the Thunder, years before Daigneault was elevated to the top job.)

But the Warriors’ ability to beat your defense’s Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, and more is and should be the eventual goal for teams like OKC. That’s a good thing to shoot for. And Daigneault is probably right that you can’t get there without seeing teams junk it up against you first.

Now comes the fun part: we get to see the Thunder work to find the solutions Daigneault knows they need. With players like SGA, Holmgren, Jalen Williams, and more, there are a wide variety of things they can try. And I can’t wait to watch them problem-solve in real time.