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Injuries haven’t done much to disrupt the Oklahoma City Thunder as they approach the quarter-pole of the regular season schedule, with their performance confirming that their ascension to the top of the Western Conference standings last year wasn’t a fluke.

Even without Chet Holmgren and Alex Caruso, both sidelined by hip injuries, the Thunder remain in first place in the West. Their 101-93 road victory over the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday was their fourth in succession and seventh in nine games, with Oklahoma City set to conclude a four-game road trip against the Houston Rockets — just 1 1/2 games back of the Thunder — on Sunday.

The Thunder have been forced to grind a bit offensively without Holmgren, ranking 12th in the league in offensive rating (114.4 points per 100 possessions) over the nine games that he has missed with a pelvic fracture. Oklahoma City remains buoyed by its league-leading defense, but while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored a game-high 36 points against the Lakers, the Thunder shot only 40.9 percent while missing 27 of 40 3-pointers.

Losing Holmgren certainly undermines offensive efficiency, but the Thunder experienced similar issues last season after racing out of the gate and establishing themselves as a Western Conference title contender by winning 22 of 31 games before the calendar flipped to 2024.

“It’s similar to last season where we got off to a good start … and teams started to scheme and throw different things at us,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “And the first time through that you see those things can be challenging. But you’d rather see them in November and December than wait to see them later in the year because it allows you to calibrate. It allows you to work on those things.”

Only one of the Rockets’ six losses has yielded a double-digit margin: a 126-107 road loss to the Thunder on Nov. 8. Houston’s other five losses came by a combined 21 points, making its performance against Oklahoma City an early outlier and worthy of intensive review.

Gilgeous-Alexander scored 29 points on 11-of-16 shooting while logging only 29 minutes in the victory. Although he produces matchup difficulties for most opponents — Gilgeous-Alexander is third in the NBA in scoring (29.8 points per game) — the Rockets aim to construct a sounder approach to defending him this time around, with a blueprint established against other high-scoring guards serving as the template on Sunday.

Dillon Brooks and Amen Thompson are likely to share the individual responsibility in defending Gilgeous-Alexander, but the Rockets’ aggressiveness must set the foundation for their plan.

“We were back on our heels a little bit too much and he was getting a head of steam getting downhill and attacking,” Rockets coach Ime Udoka said of Gilgeous-Alexander. “We’re going to switch and do what we do there but similar to (Tyrese) Maxey and Anthony Edwards, where we were the aggressor in our switches, being aggressive and not sitting on our heels where he’s attacking downhill the whole time, we’d like to do that.

“Just show him more of a crowd. He was free to move and had a lot of room to operate. We’re going to make him guess a little bit more.”

–Field Level Media