Before the season started, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s starting lineup starred on the cover of Slam Magazine to signify to the league that this would be the year they announce themselves. After three years of being the league’s “black eye,” intentionally playing losing basketball to get higher draft picks, the Thunder had finally put together a young team ready to compete.
Was this presumptuous? Nope. OKC has gotten off to a blazing start to the season, with a 10-4 record and sitting at the second seed in the Western Conference.
Despite this, there’s a glaring hole in the team that will have to be addressed eventually. As a Thunder fan, I’ll be approaching this from my lens as a fan, not as a third-party watcher.
Josh Giddey needs to be traded.
Giddey’s first two years of his NBA career have been great, and the talks of trading him within the Thunder fanbase were pretty much nonexistent until this year and his slow start. Despite this, I’m not pushing for a Giddey trade just because his shots aren’t falling; the issues of roster construction with his skillset have always been apparent and questionable even when he was putting up good numbers.
Let’s start with Giddey as a player. As it is right now, he’s a bad shooter and mediocre defender, which itself isn’t exactly a recipe for success in today’s NBA. To go along with this, his handle is extremely loose and he struggles finishing at the rim, which makes the idea of him being a big guard that can bully smaller defenders and take them to the hoop a little moot. Even though what I described sounds like the worst player to ever pick up a basketball, Giddey still has star potential — he’s a generational passing talent, and that can’t be overlooked.
The question that makes itself more apparent everyday is whether or not this skillset is compatible with our team. This year, we’ve ran a pace and space offense built upon driving to the rim and generating open threes. This type of offense has been a godsend for us, as we’re currently the seventh-best offense in the league and the most efficient offense. Our pace and space offense is driven by having guys who can put the ball on the floor, drive to the rim, pass out, and hit open shots. As it is right now, Giddey can only do one of those things — pass. Defenses know this too, as help defenders are helping off Giddey, who poses almost no scoring threat. This only makes every other player’s life harder on offense, as they’ll see more defensive attention when defenders can pay less attention to a certain player.
For about three years, it’s been apparent that the best offense would be surrounding our superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who happens to be the best driver in the league who can bend defenses at his will, with shooters that can open up the lanes and capitalize off the looks he’s created. That’s been true this year, and that’s also why our best offenses are with Giddey off the floor and with a shooter like Isaiah Joe or Cason Wallace in his place. We’ve heard nonstop hype from the media that the future backcourt of this team would be SGA and Giddey, but both the eye test and statistics prove that our best backcourt is actually SGA and Isaiah Joe, a player we picked up off waivers last year that nobody thought would even break into the rotation. Giddey’s inability to shoot or score in general has led to him being completely outplayed by Joe, a waiver player, and Cason Wallace, a rookie.
Then there’s the problems on the defensive end. If we were evaluating Giddey in a vacuum, stripped of the context of the team, then we could come to the conclusion that he’s not a terrible defender and doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. In the context of the team, we see that there are three potential candidates to take Giddey’s starting spot that are both better offensively and defensively (Isaiah Joe, Cason Wallace, and Kenrich Williams). In the case of Kenrich specifically, he is world’s better as a defender and a rebounder. Giddey isn’t a bad rebounder by any means, but we’re one of the worst rebounding teams in the league. Giddey being the second best rebounder in our lineup isn’t exactly the best solution to our rebounding issue.
It’s been established that Giddey at this point in time is, to put it bluntly, detrimental to this team. The most common objection, however, is that he’s only 21. We should just be patient with his development right?
To this, I acknowledge that for me to act like Giddey won’t improve on his weaknesses would be idiotic. His shooting percentages will likely return to normal (which still isn’t that high) by the end of the season, and of course the handle and finishing will improve with time and experience. I raise one glaring issue to this argument — time isn’t unlimited. Sure, we’re still a young team and aren’t serious contenders this year, but I think too many Thunder fans have gotten accustomed to us being a horrible team that had the freedom to play players that weren’t conducive to immediate wins in the name of development. Now? We have a superstar entering the prime of his career, as well as a team full of productive players that is good enough to win against any team on any given night. Why would we not be trying our hardest to win games if it’s a possibility? On top of that, Shai has only three years left on his contract before he hits unrestricted free agency. As an organization, we need to show him how serious we are about winning before he decides to walk for nothing. If sacrificing Giddey’s development is necessary to convey that message, then that’s a tradeoff I would take seven days a week. Additionally, if we wanted to maximize Giddey’s development, we would be sacrificing the development of other players. Giddey is most effective with the ball in his hands, as is Shai, Jalen Williams, and even Chet Holmgren, and I’d much rather give the on-ball reps to those three.
On top of all of this, Giddey still has trade value. He’s a young player who just averaged 16 points, 8 rebounds, and 6 assists a game last year. By all accounts, he’s a good player who just doesn’t fit on this Thunder team. In the interest of both parties, it’d be best to trade him and our historic arsenal of picks for a player that fits this team, like Lauri Markkanen or Pascal Siakam. We would become a much better team and in a position to compete while also getting better each year through the development of young players, while Giddey would get the on-ball reps and pressure-free environment he needs to blossom into a star and reach his potential.
As it is, I see two routes with Josh Giddey. We can keep him on our team and develop him at the cost of our immediate success and the development of our other young stars, or we can trade him, make our team better in both the short and long term, and let him develop into a star on a different team.
Thanks for reading.
Floor General 