What a difference a year makes for Patrick Patterson.
At the end of the Thunder's Blue and White Scrimmage, there was hardly any sweat on his now-chiseled 6-foot-9, 230-pound frame. Patterson was listed as playing 39 minutes on the unofficial stat sheet, but that wasn't entirely accurate. The scrimmage ran 10-minute quarters for the first three periods, then switched to a running clock in the fourth.
The point is Patterson played a lot, and that wasn't possible last preseason.
“It's a night-and-day difference,” Patterson said. “I have a whole summer under my belt, a whole offseason.