The Thunder swallowed the Lakers' best punch and still didn't draw a whistle

For nearly four quarters, they played rather well.

But the Thunder's depth proved too much.

Again.

The arena lights hit different when the fix is in — or when it feels like it is.

You know the feeling.

You've felt it before, in driveway games where your friend or brother fouled you every possession and your mom, sipping lemonade from the porch, saw nothing.

You've felt it in pickup runs where the guy who owns the court gets every call, and you get none.

You've felt it in that slow, burning realization that the game you're playing is not the game being officiated.

Thursday night at the Paycom Center, the Los Angeles Lakers felt it again.

They felt it in their bones, in their bruises, in the five fouls apiece that Jaxson Hayes, Marcus Smart , and Austin Reaves accumulated like scarlet letters while the Oklahoma City Thunder swarmed and slapped and held and hacked with the impunity of men who know the whistles will stay silent.

It's clobberin' time, all right.

Except only one team is doing the clobbering, and only one team is getting called for it.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — the reigning MVP, the guy who averaged 31.1 in the regular season — is somehow averaging 19 in this series on only 14 shots a night, and Oklahoma City is winning by 18 a game.

Chet Holmgren put up 22 points, 10.5 rebounds and 2.5 blocks for the series.

Ajay Mitchell, starting for the injured Jalen Williams, is averaging 19 on 50% shooting.

Jared McCain, a midseason pickup from Philly who barely played in the first round, has made 8 of 10 3-pointers in this series.

JJ Redick's voice carried the particular strain of a man watching his game plan get hacked to pieces in real time.

"They're hard enough to play," JJ Redick said. "They're hard enough to play."

The Lakers entered the third quarter with a 63-61 lead.

Reaves was cooking — 31 points, a playoff career high, the kind of bounce-back game that makes you wonder why he ever struggled in the first place. LeBron James added 23 points.

The offense was humming.

Then Gilgeous-Alexander got tied up with Reaves. Flagrant 1 on the MVP. His fourth foul.

He went to the bench with 10:53 left in the third and the Lakers up 65-61.

Watch what happens next. Watch closely.

Because this is where the Thing shows up. This is where the clobberin' begins.

The Thunder outscored the Lakers 32-15 while Gilgeous-Alexander sat.

32-15.

Let that number sit on your chest for a minute. Let it breathe.

The reigning MVP leaves the game and his team goes on a 32-15 run.

That's not supposed to happen. That's the opposite of supposed to happen.

That's like a car going faster after you remove the engine.

"That was amazing," Gilgeous-Alexander said. "They strung together stops, they're playing the right way offensively and things are going their way. Full confidence in those guys."

Here's the thing about confidence: it's easier to have when you're not worried about foul trouble.

The Thunder play a swarming, physical brand of basketball.

They grab. They hold. They bump cutters off their routes like they're clearing traffic.

They are, by design, a menace.

And the whistles remain mute.

Reaves finished with five fouls. Smart finished with five. Hayes finished with five.

Three Lakers. Three key rotation pieces. Three guys who had to play careful, cautious, tentative basketball down the stretch because one more whistle meant watching from the bench.

Gilgeous-Alexander finished with four.

No other Thunder player had more than three.

"It's a different game," Rui Hachimura said.

The understatement landed like a feather on concrete.

James — the tank of a man who has made a first-ballot Hall of Fame living with his head down, shoulder through a defender's chest, finishing through contact that would send normal humans to the hospital — has drawn five total fouls in two games.

Five. Total. Redick didn't mince words. He never does.

"LeBron has the worst whistle of any star player I've ever seen," Redick said. "I mean, I've been with him two years now. The smaller guys, because they can be theatric, they typically draw more fouls. The bigger players that are built like LeBron, it's hard for them. But he gets clobbered. He got clobbered again tonight a bunch. That's not like a new thing. That's not specific to this crew or this series. He gets fouled a lot that doesn't happen. The guy gets hit on the head more than any player I've seen on drives and it rarely gets called."

James was asked about that quote. Asked why he thought the whistle never comes.

"I don't know," James said.

Asked if he was satisfied with the answers he gets from officials.

"No."

Asked what's going through his head.

Long pause.

The words tumbled out after that — about defensive boards, about second-chance points, about. Holmgren's putbacks, about doing a better job. But the question about the whistle hung in the air like smoke after the fireworks die.

"I don't know" is a hell of a thing to hear from a 40-year-old future Hall of Famer who has seen every defense, every double-team, every scheme ever invented to stop him.

"I don't know" is a confession. It's a surrender.

It's a man looking at the math, the tape, and the box score, and coming up empty.

Because here's the math: the Thunder are top five in basically every defensive statistical category. They are 23rd or 24th in fouls called on them per game.

"They do a really really good job of not fouling," Reaves said. The words came out flat. Measured. The careful language of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to say and exactly how much he could say without writing a check his bank account would have to cash.

Then he told the truth about the interaction that got him so visibly frustrated.

"I felt like I was respectful to all of them all night," Reaves said. "There's a million times in the past I've said way worse stuff. When we were doing the whole tip ball, when they were switching spots, I wanted to get on the other side because they had a guy on the other side was just trying to keep an advantage. And he turned around and just yelled in my face. I just thought it was disrespectful."

He paused.

"I told him that I wasn't disrespectful. I told him if I did that to him first, I would have got a tech. I feel like the only reason I didn't get a tech is because he knew he was in the wrong," Reaves said.

This is the part that doesn't show up in the box score.

The part that doesn't get captured in the highlights.

The conversations.

The confrontations.

The slow burn of a team watching the other team play with a different set of rules.

The Lakers cut the lead to five in the fourth quarter. Five points. Breathing distance. Hope distance.

Then the Thunder pulled away again.

"We just stuck with it," Holmgren said. "It's the game of basketball. It's not always going to go your way. It's about how you respond. And this team has proven many times that we know how to respond."

Here's the difference between these two teams, and it has nothing to do with talent:

The Thunder responds. The Lakers appeal.

LeBron does it. Luka does it. Austin does it.

Arms flailing. Heads snapping back. Eyes searching for the referee, for the whistle, for the call that never comes.

It has spread through the roster like a cancer, metastasizing.

Instead of finishing through contact, instead of matching the Thunder's physicality with their own, instead of putting a shoulder into a chest and saying "try that again" — they flail.

They flail and they beg and they lose.

"We can't control the referees," Hachimura said. "So we can't do anything about it. We just got to pray through."

Pray through. That's the strategy now. Prayer.

Rui Hachimura, 6-foot-8, 230 pounds, a human mountain range in sneakers, is talking about prayer.

"The Thunder are the defending champs," Luke Kennard said. "It's tough to come back into it."

Game 3 is Saturday in Los Angeles. The Lakers are down 0-2.

They are missing their best player. They are missing a key rotation piece.

They are staring at a deficit that only 13 teams in NBA history have overcome.

And they are convinced — utterly, completely, perhaps delusionally convinced — that if they just get a fair whistle, everything changes.

Maybe they're right. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe it doesn't matter either way.

Because here's what Ben Grimm knows that the Lakers haven't learned yet:

It's clobberin' time isn't something you say after the whistle blows.

It's something you say before.

Before the contact.

Before the drive.

Before the defender wraps both arms around your waist and the referee looks the other way.

Before you decide that tonight, right now, in this moment — you are the hammer, not the nail.

The Lakers keep waiting for the call.

The Thunder keep making the play.

And somewhere in the back of that Lakers locker room, in the space between a 125-107 loss and a flight back to Los Angeles, between Reaves' 31 points and James' zero free throws, between the fifth foul on Hayes and the fourth foul on Gilgeous-Alexander — somewhere in that space, you can almost hear it.

A voice made of gravel and Yancy Street concrete.

It's clobberin' time.

The question is whether anyone is listening.