Oklahoma City Thunder: Last two games important - NewsOK.com (blog)

on April 24, 2012M at 6:50 pm

The Thunder is cemented into the second seed, but that doesn’t mean its final two regular-season games are meaningless. How the Thunder does against Sacramento on Tuesday night and Denver on Wednesday night could decide the NBA championship.

The Thunder and the Heat went into Tuesday night with the same record, 46-18. The Thunder owns the tiebreaker over Miami, so if the teams finish with the same record, or the Thunder finishes with a better record than the Heat, Oklahoma City would host a potential NBA Finals Game 7 involving those squads. Of course, it’s a long road for both to make it to the NBA Finals, particularly the Thunder, which has got to play better than its April performance.

But still. Last year, Scotty Brooks blew off the regular-season finale, resting his starters in the fourth quarter against Milwaukee. The Thunder blew a big lead and lost.

I wouldn’t recommend that this year, though Brooks claims it hasn’t entered into his thinking.

“No,” Brooks said when asked if he had considered the Miami implications. “No, no. We just focus on game-to-game and day-to-day. Wherever we end up, we have to live with the results. It’s something I haven’t thought about.”

Brooks said strategizing for scenarios almost two months in the future “is not how I operate. Not how our team operates. It’s fun to think about those terms, but you can’t be that arrogant” that the Thunder is Finals-bound.

Actually, going all out is exactly how the Thunder operates. These Boomers don’t take off games. They sometimes don’t play well. They sometimes lose focus. But they never take losing well. They want to win. That’s why maintaining that attitude is huge even these last two games.

“The history of the league, we know you can win on anyone’s court,” Brooks said, noting that the Thunder won in Denver, Memphis and Dallas in the 2011 playoffs, while losing home games against the latter two. “It would be fun to think about, but it’s not anything we’ve talked about.”

Kendrick Perkins said the Thunder can’t worry about Miami, but did say “right now, we’re about making it out of the West. San Antonio, it most likely will be us and them.”

The Thunder would not have homecourt advantage against the Chicago Bulls, unless the Thunder wins its final two games and the Bulls lose their final two. Chicago plays at Indiana on Wednesday night and hosts Cleveland on Thursday night.

-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.

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