I lived all over Oklahoma City during the first Thunder boom years and as a cultural force, the team was completely inescapable come playoff time. Foot traffic downtown ticked up. Tickets became a social currency, not just an entertainment commodity. A fresh mural of a star player would reliably go up in whatever neighborhood was trendiest.
And then Kevin Durant left in free agency which initiated a four-year period of first-round playoff exits followed by a complete roster teardown and a couple of years of stinky ball before the Thunder became a force in the league again.
If it wasn’t clear already (one of the NBA’s most astute analysts, Zach Lowe, picked them to win the title at the beginning of the season), the Thunder emerged as the clear championship frontrunners this week. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won league MVP after the team put away a formidable but flawed Denver Nuggets team in a series that went to seven games but probably shouldn’t have.
The Thunder won an eye-popping 68 games this season, but we had no guarantee that the way that they won—freakishly tryhard, high-effort defense paired with a good but not incredible modern offense that Gilgeous-Alexander takes over in crunch time—would get the job done in the playoffs, when everybody dials up their effort. And yet, Coach Mark Daigneault has continued to rely on 12 different players for quality minutes when other teams’ rotations shrink to just eight or nine guys.
Now the Thunder are up two games up on an inexperienced Minnesota Timberwolves team with two just-as-inexperienced teams from the league’s wimpier Eastern Conference waiting on the horizon. It’s OKC’s title to lose.
Looking beyond this season, the Thunder are loaded with quality young players and future draft assets, thanks to a series of GM Sam Presti’s big, smart bets all hitting at the right time. His trade for Gilgeous-Alexander may go down as the best of this, or any era.
Meanwhile, the stars of the last era of the NBA (LeBron James, Durant, Steph Curry) are aging out of relevance, and the last three champions suffered catastrophic injuries (Celtics), self-sabotage (Bucks) or cheap ownership unwilling to spend on better players (Nuggets). The future of the NBA, whose appeal is international, could belong to our humble, westward neighbors in Oklahoma City.