I don’t think anybody out there, even the most vacuous and uninformed “fans” whose basketball wisdom is sourced entirely from grammatically questionable YouTube comments, blames Steven Adams for the Thunder’s loss in the first round. It’s true that he didn’t accumulate much in the way of box-score stats in the first five games (he put up 19/16 in the sixth), but the extent to which he contributes points is limited by the desire of his teammates to get him the ball. If Adams doesn’t get the ball in situations where he can score, he’s not gonna score.
I didn’t watch this series closely, but I’ll assume that the defensive prowess of one Rudy Gobert also had something to do with Adams’ “struggles”. That, again, is not Adams fault, because everybody struggles against that guy. I would try to find out what Adams’ stats looked like with Gobert off the floor, but I’m too dumb to know if there’s even a place where you can look up stats like that, and there’s no way I’m doing that manually. I have very little respect for my own free time, but I have enough respect for it that I’m not going to go comb through box-scores to figure out how much Adams’ FG% improved when he didn’t have to deal with Gobert.
This is obviously the last Adams vid for the season unless he gets traded during the playoffs (hopefully for Thon Maker), so I only have one more chance to make a point I have made many times in the past: Steven Adams is walking proof that a role-player can have a bigger impact on winning games than so-called “stars”.