Hopefully this game goes a fair way towards rehabilitating Alex Abrines’ reputation with Thunder fans. I don’t think they were very happy with his performance so far this year. At all. He scored 29 points total in the 6 games before this, and when you combine that with all the losing… yeah. And it’s not like you can blame them, really. Players get paid to be good. They don’t get paid to be bad and to be from Majorca where it’s probably summer all the time and there are chicks walking around in bikinis (or less, you know it’s Europe over there) at all hours.
God damn it. Sometimes I don’t really like Wisconsin.
Happily for everyone except the Hornets, Abrines really came alive in the third quarter of this one, scoring a whole ton of points and brining his team back from a huge deficit. He’s the reason the Thunder won this game. Straight up. Other players may have done things as well, but if you replace his 25 with a more-typical 0, the Thunder lose yet again and Billy Donovan probably gets fired.
Is he even on the hot seat? Probably not now, but was he ever? If the Thunder are looking for a new coach, I humbly offer my services. Apparently Westbrook ignores all the playcalls anyway, so it doesn’t matter that I don’t know any plays. But what I do know is all the players’ names and their tendences, and I’m sure they won’t mind when I don’t come back from the locker room at halftime because I’m too busy making highlight vids.