talking about the late-night texts of encouragement he'd receive from the center. One player said Perkins is almost like a team psychologist, making phone calls and sending constant texts to mentor and motivate.

"Sometimes I wonder when he sleeps," coach Scott Brooks said.

It seems like a canned cop-out to say a lot of Perkins' value lies in his intangibles, but he means something to his teammates. You can see that in the way they talk about him, the way they listen to him, the way they cheer him on.

What's lost when looking for raw statistics is that some players don't actively hunt them. Only one player can have the ball in his hands at a time, and with the Thunder, it's pretty clear who the first two choices aredo. He's remarkably self-aware, a player who is never going to confuse his skill set with that of a Pau Gasol or a Dwight Howard. He consistently makes fun of himself in practice, recently saying, "It happens to the best of us, me, Jordan ..." after losing a free throw contest to a teammate. After a game a few weeks ago, Perkins joked about hearing some MVP chants from the crowd, and then admitted maybe he was actually only hearing them in his head. He pokes fun at his own "one-inch vertical" as he calls it, and has no problem acknowledging what he does isn't sexy.

"When most great organizations are looking at players they want to max out, of course, yeah, they score points, and yeah, they get