The Oklahoma City Thunder will attempt to win two games in as many days and also equal their longest winning streak of the season Saturday night when they visit the Sacramento Kings.
Luguentz Dort led a balanced attack with 23 points and Oklahoma City’s defense continued an impressive stretch in a 96-93 win at Portland on Friday night. It was the Thunder’s second victory over the Trail Blazers in five days and third straight overall.
A fourth consecutive victory would match the club’s longest winning streak of the season, a four-gamer in early November that concluded with a 105-103 home win over the Kings.
Dort had 22 points in that win, tying Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for game-high honors.
Gilgeous-Alexander, the team’s leading scorer for the season at 22.7 points per game, won’t play in the rematch because of a sprained right ankle.
Surprisingly, the Thunder’s winning streak has come without him. Oklahoma City produced two strong defensive efforts to sweep the Trail Blazers, games that sandwiched a 120-114 overtime win at Dallas.
“That’s the end we want to hang our hats on,” Josh Giddey said Friday after he and his mates limited the Trail Blazers to 6-for-33 shooting on 3-point attempts. “The last few games, we’ve kept teams to good scores. Winnable games all of them. We haven’t won all of them, but keeping them within reach. We’ve done a really good job on that end. The sharper we are on that end, the harder we are to beat.”
The Kings already have pulled even with the Thunder in the season series, recording a 117-111 home win in December on a night when Harrison Barnes and Tyrese Haliburton combined for 10 3-pointers. Sacramento went 17-for-39 as a team from beyond the arc, outscoring the Thunder 51-33 on threes.
The Kings won’t be riding the momentum of a winning streak when they see the Thunder for a third time, but nonetheless they took a positive vibe from their 126-114 loss to the Golden State Warriors on Thursday in San Francisco.
Sacramento was playing its second game in two nights. The Kings surprised the visiting Brooklyn Nets on Wednesday, then scorched a strong Warriors defense with 52.5 percent shooting in the competitive defeat.
“The fight was there. The competitiveness was there. The guys playing hard, that was there,” veteran Maurice Harkless said of a team that had lost seven in a row before the Brooklyn win. “I think at the very least we should be able to do that every night and then live with the results.
“I’m not really into moral victories, but we didn’t lay down, we didn’t quit and we kept trying to put ourselves in a position to win. Unfortunately that didn’t happen tonight, but if we come in with that same effort, the same attitude, mind-set, we’ll win a lot more games moving forward.”
Attempting to determine if they should sell assets before the upcoming trade deadline or make a run at the Western Conference play-in tournament, the Kings get a timely three-game homestand that includes a two-game sequence against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Sacramento hopes to have De’Aaron Fox back for the homestand. He has missed the past seven games with a sore ankle.
Meanwhile, the Thunder will be wrapping up a three-game trip in Sacramento, after which they return home to host Golden State on Monday.
