East-leading Detroit winning 124-116<\/a>, the Thunder were without their top six scorers.<\/p>\n\u201cWe obviously had the wind in our faces a little out there tonight,\u201d Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. \u201cI thought it was a really good effort by the guys who played to gut that one out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oklahoma City started the game without its four leading scorers \u2014 Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (abdomen), Jalen Williams (hamstring), Ajay Mitchell (abdomen) and Chet Holmgren (back) \u2014 and sixth-leading scorer Isaiah Hartenstein (calf).<\/p>\n
The only player from the top six who played was Isaiah Joe, who averages 11.0 points, and the only regular starter will be Lu Dort.<\/p>\n
With those two and a few rotation players, the Thunder led 34-22 after one quarter, but the Pistons outscored them 36-18 in the second \u2014 the worst margin Oklahoma City has had in any quarter this season.<\/p>\n
Things got even worse at halftime, with Joe (hip) and two-way center Branden Carson (back) unable to play,<\/p>\n
Detroit led 92-75 late in the third quarter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe game got away from us a little bit in the third, and it looked like it was going to be a runaway,\u201d Daigneault said. \u201cBut our guys did a great job of getting back into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oklahoma City got as close as three points in the fourth, but couldn’t get the Pistons off the glass<\/p>\n
The unquestioned star of the night for Oklahoma City was center Jaylin Williams. He had 14 of his career-high 30 points in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe showed great toughness and, obviously, great offense,\u201d Daigneault said. \u201cWe really flowed through him, and against a team that really pressures like Detroit, he was a great help for us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT (AP) \u2014 The Detroit Pistons faced a shell of the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[16738,3979,64,63,12266,590,85],"class_list":["post-505609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-app-top-stories","tag-associated-press","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-detroit","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}