George Hill’s halftime speech helped propel Thunder to massive comeback
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
There were lots of players who pushed the Oklahoma City Thunder to overcome the 22-point deficit against the Chicago Bulls. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had 33 points. Lu Dort had six steals. Kenrich Williams gave fourth quarter and overtime minutes, and Mike Muscala hit two overtime 3s.
But the “catalyst” of the 127-125 overtime win, as head coach Mark Daigneault put it, was a player who went 3-for-11 from the field.
George Hill was mentioned by several people in the postgame Zoom interviews, some of whom weren’t asked explicitly about him.
“G-Hill gave us a good speech at half and we came out and responded,” forward Williams said.
“We just had a quick conversation. He was just telling us that the way we were playing was not the right way,” Dort said. “We had to play together as a team.”
“He just told us at halftime that playing the way we were, there was no way we were gonna be able to compete with any team in the NBA,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, “and that we’re capable of playing the right way.”
That’s blunt, but Hill wasn’t wrong. The Thunder trailed the four-win Bulls by 18 at the half and had given up 68 points over the first 24 minutes.
Oklahoma City responded. The team scored 37 points in the third quarter, tied for the most it had put up in a quarter all season, cutting the deficit to single-digits.
“We all listened and then second half we just really came out and moved the ball well,” Dort said. “We just had to battle and compete, and the leadership he had at halftime really pushed us to play better in the second half.”
The Thunder trailed by 16 with just 4:40 to play, but Hill assisted an Isaiah Roby dunk, Williams got a steal and dunk, and Gilgeous-Alexander hit a 3 in a span of less than one minute.
With just under two minutes to play, Hill got an offensive rebound that led to Muscala getting fouled on a 3-point attempt. He made all three free throws.
Gilgeous-Alexander accounted for the final seven points of regulation, as he hit a 2, assisted a Williams dunk, and then drew an and-one to tie the game at 118. The Thunder defense prevented Zach LaVine from hitting the 3 at the end of regulation.
In overtime, Muscala hit two 3s, Williams made a shot near the basket and Hill’s free throw with five seconds left put OKC up by two.
Hill finished with eight points, fewer than seven of his Thunder teammates, but there’s a reason he was brought up continuously after the game.
“It wasn’t like George Hill was scoring 20 points,” Daigneault said. “He poured himself into the team tonight and there was a contagious nature to that.”
One of the biggest issues young teams run into is a lack of leadership. It can be tough for those types of teams to find veterans who aren’t just good bench presences, but able to command a voice on the court as well.
Hill showed how important that is to winning games on Friday night.
