If you follow my blog, my most recent post discussed how the Spurs had put together one of the top 10 (and probably top 5) regular seasons of the last 30 years, and how their winning resembled a tank slowly crushing their opponents into dust. Going into the Western Conference Semifinals, I didn’t really think the Thunder stood a chance. The Spurs were not only undeniably better on paper, but they had all the intangibles in their favor: a great organization, disciplined team, and one of the all-time great coaches going against a team known for unmet potential, 4th quarter choke jobs, and a rookie coach. What chance did the Thunder have, especially after they decided to not play defense in Game 1? I was kicking myself for not putting money on the Spurs to go all the way earlier in the season when I could have gotten 5-to-1 odds.

Then this happened.

Despite losing the first game by 32 points (and if you watched Game 1, it wasn’t even that close), the Thunder managed to win four of the next five, including two in San Antonio! The Spurs had only one other loss at home all season – the Thunder beat the Spurs in San Antonio more in this series than the rest of the NBA combined! How did this happen?

My process of trying to understand what happened begins over a year ago. Back in April 2015, I read an article Zach Lowe wrote about how some backup guard on the Blazers was getting minutes and looking promising. I didn’t really think much of it at the time (the playoffs were starting, the Blazers were clearly overseeded, and I thought LaMarcus Aldridge was the Blazers’s best player anyway …), but it turns out that dude was CJ McCollum. McCollum had a breakout year, and while I’d normally insert statistics to back this point up, the below clip of what he did to Steph Curry in Game 5 does him more justice:

Needless to say, I learned a valuable lesson: Zach Lowe is from the NBA future, and when he writes about an emerging star, you should take note. Which brings me to Steven Adams.

And his facial hair

Lowe wrote a post on Steven Adams’s mustache impact before game 5, and while this article focused on how Adams’s newfound usefulness on offense (and ability to control the paint) and how this may have changed the series, it’s another sentence that caught my eye:

“Donovan feels emboldened to stretch the gigantic Kanter-Adams double-mustache look over extended minutes. The two behemoths have shared the floor for 36 minutes total over the past three games, and the Thunder have blitzed San Antonio by 12 points over that span … Oklahoma City has rebounded a preposterous 48 percent of its own misses with those two on the floor over the past three games, per NBA.com.”

That may not seem like a lot, but in 2016, NBA teams rebounded about 24% of their own misses, i.e. half that amount. You don’t need a degree in statistics to know that whenever you do something at twice the NBA rate, even for a limited amount of time, that’s objectively ridiculous!

So when we look at some of the metrics underlying the Thunder’s upset of the Spurs, one metric jumps out: rebounding. I’ve listed the Four Factors below for the Thunder and Spurs for the series, as well as a normalized version of those metrics. As you can see, despite the Spurs boasting LaMarcus Aldridge, Tim Duncan, and David West, the Thunder murdered the Spurs on the glass.

The Thunder ended up grabbing 20% more boards (272 to 227) than the Spurs in this series, and guess who led the Thunder in rebounding (hint: his name is Steven Adams). But that wasn’t the only statistic where he led the Thunder for the series; he also led them in Plus/Minus (per Basketball-Reference.com).

Plus/Minus isn’t a perfect statistic by any means, and with small sample sizes, it can definitely be misleading (ex: Randy Foye’s Plus/Minus for the series was +8). But in this case, I think it’s somewhat justified. Adams made a huge difference and may have played Tim Duncan into retirement. While he won’t get any MVP votes, I do think this series solidified his status as third best player on the Thunder as well as one of the elite bigs in the NBA.

DEATH OF THE BIG MAN OR RISE OF THE STACHE BROTHERS?

One of the narratives of this past season has been the decline in big men as small ball and guard play are ascendant, and one statistic that shows this trend is the decline in offensive rebounds over the last 30 years. I’ve plotted the league average for offensive rebound rate below, and well, let’s just say rebounding ain’t what it used to be.

Traditionally it was the big man’s job to crash the offensive glass to get more possessions for his team, but now coaches are more concerned about getting back on defense to prevent speedy guards from getting easy buckets in transition. As a result, offensive rebounds have suffered (as detailed in this Lowe piece).

With that said, as the Western Conference Finals between the Thunder and Warriors comes into focus, I can’t help but notice one fun storyline developing. The Warriors had the best shooting season in NBA history (measured by effective field goal percentage), and the Smallball Lineup of Death anchored by the Splash Brothers is probably the best combination of shooters to share an NBA floor. Simply put, Warriors won 73 games by outshooting their opponents.

The Thunder do have great scorers of their own; Durant and Westbrook were 3rd and 8th in points per game this season, and Oklahoma was 2nd in offensive efficiency. But the Thunder didn’t outshoot their opponents so much as they outrebounded them. They lead the league with a rebounding rate of 54.7%, but that’s not just the best rate in 2016- it was the best rebounding rate in over 40 years and the 2nd best in NBA history (only behind the ’73 Celtics)! While the Splash Brothers outshot the competition and controlled the perimeter, the Thunder, with Kanter and Adams, i.e. the Stache Brothers, outboarded their opponents and controlled the glass. For months, I’ve been excited at a Western Conference Finals with two of the top-10 regular season teams of all time. Now I’m excited to watch the best shooting team in NBA history face off against the (2nd) best rebounding team!

So are these guys!

So far, 2016’s (deservedly) belonged to the Warriors, Steph Curry, and the Splash Brothers, and they’re still the clear favorite to make it to the Finals and end the season as back-to-back champs. But it’s not just Kanter and Adams’s mustaches- Oklahoma’s always had a little bit of a hipster streak and who knows? They’ve already defeated one of the all-time great teams in NBA history and are peaking at the right time. Maybe they’ll make rebounding cool again.

Setting his sights on a championship. Or fair trade coffee. Or both.