The Oklahoma City Thunder are in the midst of a years-long rebuild, which has led to them rolling out some lineups filled with names that the casual NBA fan may have never heard before. Remember: If a person is in the NBA, they are way way way better at basketball than 99.99999 percent of humans on earth, but for the last few years, the Thunder have been accused of shutting their more established players down early with an eye on losing a ton of games and getting the ping pong balls to bounce in their favor during the NBA Draft Lottery.
This will lead to the occasional odd rotation, like the one we saw on Tuesday night. Oklahoma City took on the Portland Trail Blazers and played seven guys, some of whom made their NBA debuts. And despite this, the Thunder won, 98-94, with one guy (we won’t say who for reasons that will be obvious in a moment, but here is a spoiler) doing something that has not been done since Shaq.
In an attempt to fill the internet with some non-Lakers content, we decided to test the knowledge of basketball fans and also fans of Ray Romano sitcoms. Below is a list of 20 names, seven of them belonging to the guys who played for the Thunder on Tuesday, 13 of them belonging to individuals who, per IMDb, appeared in no more than one episode of Everybody Love Raymond. Here is the list:
Leo Abbe-Schneider
Mike Batayeh
Jack Blessing
Eugene Greytak
Jaylen Hoard
Mitch Holleman
Georgios Kalaitzakis
Dan Kinsella
Vit Krejci
Lawrence LeJohn
Scotty Leavenworth
Lance E. Nichols
Michael Papajohn
Paul Reubens
Isaiah Roby
Olivier Sarr
Zavier Simpson
Geoff Stults
Lindy Waters III
James Worthy
Did you guess? Do you think you did well? We are going to post a YouTube video of the game highlights, and underneath in italics are the names of the Thunder players from the above list.
Hoard, Kalaitzakis, Krejci, Roby, Sarr, Simpson, Waters
Congratulations to everyone who got all seven right, congratulations to those who remembered that Worthy appeared on the sitcom one time, congratulations to the Thunder on the win, and congratulations to Everybody Loves Raymond for nine seasons of pretty good television.