NBA.com rankings has OKC 4th. Rookie Reggie Jackson has big shoes to fill. Eric Maynor, lost for the season with a torn ACL, was part of a bench crew that almost always pushed the scoreboard in the right direction for the Thunder. Even this season, Maynor had a better plus-minus mark than all of the OKC starters.
Mark Stein of ESPN is third. Six teams have had a back-to-back-to-back set already, and all six, bizarrely, won the third game after teams went 28-36 in that situation during Lockout 1999. Only OKC, though, went a perfect 3-0 … despite losing Eric Maynor for the season in the middle of it.
Fox Sports has OKC 2nd. Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook are friends again. So Thunder have already survived adversity, and kept on rolling.
InsideHoops has OKC third. Outscoring opponents by just 3.4 ppg so far, Kevin Durant’s thunder are still rising.
USA Today has OKC #4. Thunder forward Kevin Durant became just the fourth player in 30 years to score 30 or more points in the first four games of the season.
Chicago Tribune has OKC at two. All quiet on the (Russell) Westbrook front as Thunder shake sideline drama.
OKC sits at #2 in the complex.com rankings. Well, they had to lose sometime – but did it have to be to the Mavericks? Oklahoma City actually slipped in consecutive games, losing by double digits to the slow-starting Mavericks and to the Blazers (giving up 100-plus in each loss, no less) before starting a new winning streak by becoming the first team in ’11-12 to win a back-to-back-to-back It helped that two of the three were against the struggling Rockets, but a win is a win (and three wins are three wins). Over the weekend they lost backup point Eric Maynor for the season, but backup backup point Reggie Jackson was Mr. January for a night at least, notching 11 points and 4 assists in the win over the Spurs.
