Berger: Spare me the Spurs-Thunder narratives

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As the Thunder and Spurs have dueled brilliantly through a thrilling Game 5 in San Antonio on Tuesday night, the so-called narratives have gotten in the way of a good story.

Game-by-game — quarter-by-quarter, it seems — we’ve allowed our perceptions and the outside stuff to overwhelm what has been a remarkable basketball series that would stand on its own merits, if we’d only let it.

But as with politics, we need good guys and bad guys in sports. Thus, the Spurs are the divine purveyors of artful, unselfish, team-first basketball. They are everything that is good and pure about the game.

The bad guys? That’s the Thunder — selfish ball hogs who would rather persecute the viewing public with isolation sets and hero ball (now the most overused phrase in the NBA, other than possibly “analytics.”)

Well, guess what? It’s Ball Hogs 3, Basketball Artists 2 after the Thunder beat the Spurs 95-91 in San Antonio as the series returns to Oklahoma City for Game 6 — a game that might also run counter to our perpetual belief that the Spurs always know best, as they are, in fact, a pretty terrible 2-10 under Gregg Popovich when facing elimination. For OKC, will that be billed as the “last game Kevin Durant could play in a Thunder uniform?” Only in your talk-radio voice and hot-take dreams.

Why can’t they just be two of the best teams in the NBA, going back and forth in a thrilling postseason series that has drama, stars, strategy and breathtaking (sometimes, controversial) finishes?

Because old perceptions die hard.

Through their first nine playoff games heading into Tuesday night, the Thunder derived 10.9 percent of their offensive plays from isolation. That isn’t as frequent as hot-take nation would suggest, though it is third highest in the league — behind Memphis and Cleveland, the latter of which has been universally praised for unselfish play and ball movement while sweeping through the first two rounds in the East.

The smart people call this cognitive dissonance. You could look it up.

The Spurs? Dead last at 4.7 percent of their plays in isolation, as you might imagine. But when you consider that the Thunder produce 0.94 points per isolation play compared to the Spurs’ 0.66, is it any wonder why they do it more? It works better!

Nobody wants to see that, I guess, or appreciate that we have two teams that play very differently — one of which is going to win and one of which is going to lose. We’re entering a …

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