The Oklahoma City Thunder defeat the Phoenix Suns, 121-109, to take a 3-0 series lead.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are one one of the most dominant, two-year runs in NBA history, and the dominance continued with a 121-109 victory in Game 3 of their first round series with the Phoenix Suns on Saturday afternoon.
The Thunder were without Jalen Williams, who suffered a hamstring strain three days earlier. But Shai Gilgeous-Alexander didn’t need much help.
The reigning MVP scored a career-playoff-high 42 points, shooting an amazing 15-for-18 from the field and 11-for-12 from the free throw line, adding eight assists. The Thunder continue to score efficiently against what was a top-10 defense in the regular season, and Gilgeous-Alexander’s performance was just the seventh 40-point playoff game in NBA history where the player had a true shooting percentage over 90%.
Playing at home for the first time, the Suns led by nine points late in the first quarter. But the Thunder closed the period on an 18-4 run and were in control most of the way after that.
Here are some notes, numbers and film as the champs improved to 11-0 in first-round games over the last three years:
1. Gilgeous-Alexander is too much from mid-range
Even when he won the Kia MVP award last season, Gilgeous-Alexander wasn’t as good of a mid-range shooter as he was this year, when he shot an incredible 197-for-359 (54.9%) between the paint and the 3-point line. That was the fourth-best mark for a player with at least 300 mid-range attempts in the 29 seasons for which we have shot-location data; the only three better ones are held by Kevin Durant.
On Saturday, Gilgeous-Alexander was 6-for-7 from mid-range, and his best work was done over the last six minutes of the second quarter, when the Thunder took full control of Game 3.
Collin Gillespie has been Gilgeous-Alexander’s primary defender for most of this series, but he was getting the business. So the Suns actually assigned starting center Oso Ighodaro to the MVP for a stretch late in the second.
Gilgeous-Alexander proceeded to target Devin Booker in the pick-and-roll, getting to his mid-range pull-up:
On the next possession, he rejected a screen, beat Ighodaro off the dribble, and drew a foul on Booker. Then, attacking Booker again, he got an open 3 for Jaylin Williams.
Grayson Allen made his series debut on Saturday and was not spared. Gilgeous-Alexander attacked him to generate a layup for Alex Caruso and to get to another mid-range pull-up:
Finally, the Suns sent a double-team at Gilgeous-Alexander in the middle of the floor. The result was an open corner 3 for Caruso.
Again, the Suns ranked ninth defensively, and the Thunder have scored at least 120 points per 100 possessions in all three games of this series. Overall, they’ve scored 10.9 per 100 more than Phoenix allowed in the regular season.
2. Thunder handle the pressure
The biggest strength of the Suns’ defense was forcing turnovers. They ranked third in opponent turnover rate, forcing 16.5 per 100 possessions, having seen the biggest jump (by a wide margin) from last season.
But now they’re facing the team that has committed the fewest turnovers per 100 possessions in each of the last two seasons. And the Thunder have been even better at taking care of the ball in this series.
Over the three games, the champs have committed just 8.9 turnovers per 100 possessions, what would be tied for the third-lowest rate for any team in any playoff series in the 30 years for which we have play-by-play data. They’ve taken their opponents’ biggest strength and turned it into a major weakness.
According to tracking data, the Suns rank fourth in these playoffs in average pick-up distance, so they’re applying pressure. But it’s not working on the Thunder, who had just two live-ball turnovers in Game 3 on Saturday.
Shooting is the most important thing in this game, but you there are other ways to boost your efficiency and the Thunder have done it by taking care of the ball.
3. Best bench in basketball
It was a little bit of a surprise that Ajay Mitchell started in place of Jalen Williams on Saturday, given that Cason Wallace started 42 more games than Mitchell (58-16) in the regular season. Mitchell was the Thunder’s second leading scorer (15 points) in Game 3, but shot just 5-for-20, forcing some tough shots along the way.
The Thunder’s new starting lineup had played just 37 total minutes (over seven games) together in the regular season and was outscored by four points on Saturday. But the champs outscored the Suns by 16 points with at least one reserve on the floor.
Even without Williams to run the second-unit offense, the Thunder outscored the Suns by two points (20-18) in Gilgeous-Alexander’s 10 minutes on the bench. The shooting wasn’t great (8-for-22, including 1-for-7 from 3-point range), but they didn’t commit any turnovers when the MVP sat.
They used the same five-man unit (Mitchell, Wallace, Jared McCain, Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein) for those entire 10 minutes. Mitchell scored seven of his 15 points and McCain scored all of his seven in those no-SGA minutes, with a couple of SGA-esque buckets included.
The Thunder have had the league’s No. 1 bench in each of the last two seasons, and though their versatility is a little compromised with the absence of Williams, they’re never dependent on the success of any particular lineup. Still, it will be interesting to see if Mitchell remains the starter going forward.
4. Booker still can’t get going
Dillon Brooks (33 points) and Jalen Green (26) were again the Suns’ leading scorers on Saturday, and that’s by the Thunder’s design. The league’s No. 1 defense has made Devin Booker its No. 1 priority, making sure he plays in a crowd and has a hard time finding open shots.
For this entire series, Booker’s best looks at the basket have come in transition or after offensive rebounds.
When he’s used a ball-screen, he hasn’t seen any kind of advantage for himself:
The Suns have bee able to leverage the attention on Booker to get good shots for his teammates. Early in the third quarter on Saturday, there was no weak-side help on an Ighodaro roll to the rim, because Dort stayed attached to Booker in the corner:
But the Suns haven’t been able to find enough of those kinds of openings to keep up with the Thunder. And at 20.3 points per game, this is the lowest-scoring playoff series of Booker’s career. His true shooting percentage of 55.1% would be his third worst mark of the 10 series that he’s played in.
The Suns first chance to avoid a sweep is Game 4 on Monday (9:30 ET, Peacock).
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John Schuhmann has covered the NBA for more than 20 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Bluesky.
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