In the year since my writing It’s A Great Day To Be A Fairweather OKC Thunder Fan, several things have changed.
Firstly and most importantly, the Oklahoma City Thunder has won its first championship, elevating Oklahoma to the tenuous and terrifying position of number one in the National Basketball Association. Secondly and not as importantly, my dog has stopped humping things. (This will likely change with the seasons.) Thirdly, and most unnervingly: I have, against all odds, become not just a Thunder fan, but a fan of NBA basketball writ large.
A few nights previous, apropos of nothing, I asked my girlfriend: “Do you want to turn on Pistons/Magic?” Yes, that’s right, dear reader: I wanted to watch a playoff game that did not involve the Thunder. I wanted to, as it were, take the temperature of the playoffs.
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I spoke those words as if in a foreign language I’d recently learned. They would have meant nothing to me a year ago. The idea that I would want to watch a game between other NBA teams would have been as distant and as impossible as the promised return of Christ.
And yet, here I am, walking into the backyard, plaintive and somber, wondering about another promised return, that of Jalen Williams, and giving soft, sad barks at the cold waxing moon.
When I think about the stupid and unlikely yet oft-discussed possibility of Shai losing MVP to Victor Wembanyana—a merely tall man who finished 13th in scoring and only put up 11 points in 40 minutes in a loss to the Timberwolves earlier this week and who has spent less time with Buddhist monks than I have—I feel a surprising and incongruous swell of anger, like a volcano whose eruption is caused by the gravitational pull of another planet. The happenings of the National Basketball Association have begun to mean something to me.
The Thunder have put their mark on me. During last year’s finals against the Indiana Pacers, I blew my throat out during Game 5 at Paycom when JDub scored his 40-piece; both of us were forced to rest our respective muscles due to overuse. My throat has never been the same. This team has put a scar on me—and yet I bear them no ill will for it. Indeed, like a struck dog, I cling ever tighter.
At last year’s victory parade in OKC, where I very nearly fainted due to the heat, I watched tens of thousands of other fans endure the same struggle just to catch a fleeting glimpse of these boys, mostly in their 20s and early 30s—with wealth and power comparable to small nations—fully inhabiting their success. Over the sweaty mops of the other spectators, I watched the Larry O’Brien Trophy’s silver-and-gold basketball bobbing down the road; I watched Chet hoist it. One of the players was drinking straight from a bottle of tequila; I won’t say who, because I would have done the same.
If I have this right, the story of this team—indeed, the city behind this team—is the same: a bacchanalian celebration after a Dantesque struggle. As Matt Carney pointed out during last year’s run: The good times are indeed back.
In 2012, in Stillwater, I watched from the Stonewall’s beer garden as the Thunder lost in the Finals 4-1 to LeBron’s Miami Heat; I saw the giant flags be put away. When I ask fans about the years between that, Kevin Durant’s defection, and approximately 2024, their eyes glaze over like wartime vets. As a fairweather fan, I didn’t have to go through that. And I don’t mind!
It’s only getting better for us fairweather fans. The addition of Jared McCain to the roster has had a fortifying effect on me; it’s good to watch the Thunder increase its stock of guards who can get buckets. My girlfriend, in addition to being thrilled about his performances, loves to see his painted nails.
As I write this, the Thunder prepare for a fight with the Luka-less Lakers, having just swept the Phoenix Suns in round one of the playoffs. It brings me no joy to watch the Thunder play the Lakers without Dončić, whose absence will embolden the Thunder haters (who are legion) to attack our win as unearned. And yet, a win is a win, as the 2025 finals showed us; a trophy is a trophy. Against the Lakers, I predict Thunder in 6.
Am I still a fairweather fan? Only the years will tell. If the Thunder stop winning, will I fall off, like a Wemby playoff stat line? Unlike my prediction of a Thunder win, I cannot predict these things with confidence. I only know that I am more devoted than I was one year ago. I only know that tomorrow night, I will don my Thunder shirt and scream at the television at an appropriate, non-harm-incurring level. I have learned my limits.
