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Aaron Wiggins Is The Key To Understanding OKC’s Revolutionary Depth

One of the fun, mildly disorienting experiences inherent to watching the Oklahoma City Thunder is having to remember just how many guys they have. Were you aware that they traded five second-round picks last summer for a rookie from Weber State named Dillon Jones, and that Jones played 10 minutes a game this year? One would assume that the quality and level of OKC's depth would matter less as the playoffs progressed. While that is true in the sense that Jones and his cohort of deep bench-mates have been marginalized in the postseason, OKC is still dominating with their depth. Consider: Aaron Wiggins.

The fourth-year guard was critical for the Thunder off the bench in Game 2 of the Finals, logging 18 points in 21 minutes and finishing a team-high plus-24. Somewhat strangely for a bench player, the stuff Wiggins is good at is best-player stuff. His best and most important skill is three-point shooting, though he's far more than a shooter. He is 6-foot-6 with a plus wingspan; he's extremely athletic, if a little bit slight. Wiggins can drive, handle the rock in traffic, read scrambling defenses, and kick the ball out to open shooters. He has moves, and he uses them at the rim to make all sorts of impressive and impressively tough shots. Wiggins is a decent rebounder, never turns the ball over, and an active, pesky on-ball defender. The most important thing about Wiggins is that he doesn't have a weakness, not one that is all that damaging anyway. He dropped 41 and 14 on the Kings this year!

The sort of player I am describing here is one that every team in the NBA wants, a reasonable simulacrum for a star not in production but in kind. If he were on basically any other team in the NBA, Wiggins would have a larger role. For OKC, he's their eighth man, someone who plays between nine and 25 minutes per game in the playoffs. It is not that the Thunder are unaware of his talents. It's just that they are so deep that they get to use Wiggins as a luxury, a game-changer in waiting who gets to feast on backup guards.

That is the function of the Thunder's depth, both how it works and what it does. A player as good as Wiggins is never put into a situation where his weaknesses will matter. When the Pacers think about adjustments, they will be largely matters of scheme, as they're pretty maxed out on personnel tricks; at least in this series, the Johnny Furphy game is not forthcoming. OKC, on the other hand, can try out letting Wiggins make Jalen Williams' life easier during the non-Shai Gilgeous-Alexander minutes, and lo and behold, that is a big reason why Game 2 ended with garbage time instead of considerations of Tyrese Haliburton's unholy abilities. Wiggins personifies the depth that makes the Thunder such an outlandish grind to play against in every minute.

This is part of, but not all of, why I like watching Wiggins hoop. Mostly I find him a magnetic athlete, the sort who looks balanced and in control even on a court with other NBA athletes. Like a magician, or my grandma at the grocery store, his bag is larger than it might appear. Wiggins is not a plug-and-play guy who stands on the perimeter, he embodies the Thunder ethos of pure pressure, all the time with his tremendous driving and finishing skills. I would like to see more of him, but that's the catch: more exposure would mean more exposure, and Wiggins would be confronted with his shortcomings. Instead of a cool guy who shows up every other game for a slick 15-point barrage, we'd be talking about whether or not Wiggins can really be your third-best player if you want to win the games that matter. He maybe could be that, and I would like to see him get those opportunities—or more importantly, get paid as such—but it's hard to imagine what that would look like because his whole career has been spent in this unique OKC ecosystem.

That's the flipside of the OKC method. I don't think many, and quite possibly any, other teams could build a winner like this. That's partially because it requires a tentpole talent like SGA and partially because it requires a talent identification and coaching apparatus that can first collect and then leverage talent at every level, and in every role. That uncomfortable diction hints at something you can see coming if depth comes to be more important than star power in the coming years. Just as Wiggins would surely be able to earn more money if he were in a situation where he had more responsibility, middle-class players won't get paid nearly as much as they are now if they are made more replaceable by new, cheap talent. I don't know if that will come true—if teams had figured out how to find freely available players that could do Bobby Portis Stuff at a tenth the price, they would have done so and you would have noticed. But the obvious and I think correct rejoinder to this handwringing is that winning will always be valued, and Wiggins, as a winning player, will get paid. It's not like the team that Wiggins dropped those 41 points on is capable of becoming neo-OKC. Talent still matters, and Wiggins has it.

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