The Oklahoma City Thunder's bid to repeat as NBA champions ended at home on Saturday, a 111-103 Game 7 loss to the San Antonio Spurs that bounced the West's top seed and 64-win regular-season team out of the playoffs one round short of the Finals.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who collected his second straight league MVP award before the series began, was blunt in defeat. "They were just a better team tonight from start to finish," he said. "Every time we tried to cut into it and take control of the game, it felt like they had an answer. They just played better tonight and they deserve to win the game."
The reigning Finals MVP, who has now averaged more than 30 points for four consecutive seasons, said the difficulty of going back-to-back is hard to overstate. "Winning an NBA championship is very hard in itself to do one time," Gilgeous-Alexander said. "So to do it all over again would just only make it harder."
Oklahoma City played much of the series shorthanded, missing two key rotation players to injury, and Gilgeous-Alexander — who carried a heavy offensive load in Game 7 — said he had no choice but to empty the tank. "I didn't really have a choice. Big game, big moment, win or go home," he said. "I just wanted to leave everything out there."
Pressed on how much of OKC's summer would be spent specifically chasing the Spurs, the guard deferred to the front office in characteristically dry fashion. "I will give zero input," he said. "I will let Sam Presti, the greatest GM ever, do his job."
He had clear respect for the team that beat them. "They're young, they're talented, well coached. They play the right way, play together," he said of San Antonio. "You don't beat us without the makeup, and they beat us."
Head coach Mark Daigneault opened his media session by congratulating his counterpart. "We have nothing but respect for their team, their organization. And my counterpart, Mitch Johnson, I'm so happy for and impressed with," Daigneault said.
He rejected any suggestion that injuries were an alibi. "We have not been an excuse team ever, and we're not going to start now," Daigneault said. "I thought we had enough to win. But credit San Antonio, they were the one that did."
Asked to put the season in perspective for a group that had framed the year as championship-or-bust, Daigneault said both pride and disappointment could coexist. "You can be both proud of the effort and the progress and the level we were able to play," he said. "And you can also be disappointed. You don't have to choose one or the other."
The Thunder now face an offseason of business decisions around a young, established core — and, as Gilgeous-Alexander noted, a Spurs team that figures to be "somewhere in that mix" for years to come.
