There are still two All-NBA teams that technically rate higher than the third team Williams made last season, not to mention an opportunity to further establish himself as a first-tier offensive initiator.<\/p>\n
Note, too, that Williams actually slipped in subtle ways last year. He shot worse from the field and from deep than he did in 2023-24 as defenses focused more intently on him. A wrist injury probably didn’t help either.<\/p>\n
Just because he’s already announced himself as the second-best player on a title-winner, it doesn’t mean J-Dub is done improving.<\/p>\n
Dort’s minute-to-minute impact should remain at its currently high levels in his age-26 season, but it’s worth wondering whether the Thunder will trim his role as they search for a bit more balance.<\/p>\n
OKC is defined by its defense, and Dort, an All-Defense first-teamer, is a huge part of that. But if the Thunder have a flaw, it’s on the other end, where a lack of secondary creation sometimes gums up the works. The fix may be more tactical than personnel-based, but OKC might experiment with using players like Ajay Mitchell, Nikola Topi\u0107, Aaron Wiggins or Isaiah Joe more often as it tries to juice its attack.<\/p>\n
Dort will still be out there in the moments that matter most, making life difficult for the other team’s top scoring threat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are still two All-NBA teams that technically rate higher than the third team Williams made last season,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-87744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}