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Let’s be honest. The NBA’s 82-game regular season is a six month slog.
It begins in the obscurity of October, navigates through the “Nobody cares” month of November, dawdles through December, and jogs its way through the month of January.
The NFL mercifully exits the primary sports stage beginning in February.
Basketball finally has the spotlight!
Most hoops fans, though, prefer to focus on their favorite college basketball teams as they compete for a spot in the NCAA March Madness tournament. The NBA regular season continues to plod along without much media attention.
The arrival of April means that the National Basketball Association’s nearly invisible regular season is almost complete. The league’s thirty teams will have played for six months in relative obscurity.
Though the NBA executives will never admit it, the majority of the NBA’s regular season games are played with less than full intensity by both teams – especially on defense.
Except for one team this past season.
The Oklahoma City Thunder should be renamed the “OKC Tornado” for their devastating intensity in blasting NBA competitors for the entire basketball season.
OKC won the most games in the NBA’s regular season (68-14 or 83%). They obliterated the NBA’s Western Conference by finishing a whopping 16 games ahead of the second place Houston Rockets at season’s end.
The Tornado (oops – Thunder) zoomed to the top of the NBA by out hustling their competition and playing solid defense in every game. OKC was #3 in the NBA in scoring defense allowing a little more than 107 points per game.
They also scored over 120 points per game on offense. That’s a 13-point differential over an 82-game season.
The two Eastern Conference finalists (the New York Knicks and the Indiana Pacers) posted an average winning margin of just four points and two points respectively.
The post-season months of April and May have found OKC’s defense remaining rock solid by allowing the same 107 points per game. The Thunder’s offense is scoring three points fewer in the playoffs (117 ppg) which still equates to an impressive 10-point per game differential.
This translates into Oklahoma City’s sterling post-season winning percentage.
They are now 12-3 (80%) in the playoffs after downing Memphis (4-0), Denver (4-2) and, yesterday, the Minnesota Timberwolves (4-1) to capture the NBA’s Western Conference title.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are heading for the NBA Finals next week for the first time since 2012.
This NBA franchise has been around the league longer than you might think
The Oklahoma City Thunder has been playing in the Sooner State for 17 seasons. Their history begins back in 1967.
The team was originally founded as the Seattle Supersonics.
The NBA’s Seattle Supersonics were an expansion franchise which started play in 1967.
Seattle’s Sonics even won an NBA title in 1979.
During the early 2000’s, the Seattle NBA team’s ownership had trouble getting the city and its voters to pony-up to build a shiny new basketball facility for the team. (Sound familiar?)
Meanwhile, the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets were forced to quickly find a temporary home in August, 2005 after the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina that summer.
Oklahoma City welcomed the Hornets with open arms and very large and enthusiastic sell-out crowds.
A local group of investors led by Clay Bennett (who had previously worked for the San Antonio Spurs) and leaders of a few of Oklahoma’s largest energy companies cut a deal to purchase the Seattle Supersonics NBA team for $350 million in 2007.
The NBA franchise was relocated to Oklahoma City (America’s #45 TV market) beginning in 2008 and changed its nickname from Supersonics to the Thunder.
Seattle has been unsuccessful in its attempts to lure another NBA team back to the Pacific Northwest and America’s 14th largest TV market.
How the Thunder Rolls
The new Oklahoma City Thunder team hit the proverbial jackpot after arriving in the Sooner state.
Seattle had drafted the young rising star Kevin Durant from the University of Texas. The first NBA draft made as the new Oklahoma City Thunder saw talented guard Russell Westbrook of UCLA added in the first round.
Next season found OKC with the third overall selection.
The team drafted high scoring guard James “The Beard” Harden from the University of Arizona.
This trio became the foundation for the youthful Oklahoma City Thunder. OKC made it into the NBA Finals in 2012 but lost to LeBron James and Dwayne Wade’s Miami Heat in just five games.
The team traded James Harden to Houston shortly after OKC’s appearance in the NBA Finals. Harden had become upset that the Thunder’s management failed to offer him the NBA maximum contract extension. He wanted out.
A few years later, it was Kevin Durant who also bailed from Oklahoma City by joining the Golden State Warriors. Ouch again.
Guard Russell Westbrook would stick around long enough to win the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award in 2018, but OKC’s days near the top of the NBA standings were fading fast.
Oklahoma City acquired a few established NBA stars such as Paul George and Carmelo Anthony, but none seemed to mesh very well with Russell Westbrook (who liked the basketball to remain in his hands).
Russell Westbrook was eventually traded to the Houston Rockets in 2019 for point guard Chris Paul. OKC’s original trio of stars were all gone.
OKC changes directions and finds success by rebuilding from the ground up
Trading away your team’s top stars means that management must make the best of its future draft choices and free agent acquisitions.
The Oklahoma City Thunder traded away nearly every veteran on its roster. The summer of 2021 found OKC with an incredible 36 future draft picks (18 first rounders and 18 second round selections) over the next seven years.
Oklahoma City wheeled and dealed to hit the proverbial jackpot over the past several years during its recent ascension to the top of the NBA’s Western Conference.
Here’s how the team acquired a few of this season’s top players:
Shai Gilgeous Alexander – the lanky 6’6” former University of Kentucky guard was initially selected by the Clippers but acquired by OKC in the Paul George trade in 2019.
Alexander has blossomed into a major star in Oklahoma City. He averaged more than 32 points per game this season and recently was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player.
Jalen Williams – Another “Who Dat?” player name. The 6’5” Williams played three seasons at Santa Clara University and was drafted in the first round by OKC in 2022. His scoring average rose to 21 points per game this year during his third NBA season with the Thunder.
Chet Holmgren – The 7’1” razor thin “power forward” from Gonzaga has a listed weight of just 208 pounds. He was selected by OKC in the same 2022 NBA draft as Jalen Williams.
Holmgren is averaging 16 points, 8 rebounds and three blocked shots per game in the 2025 NBA playoffs. He is a surprisingly effective 3-point shooter, too.
Alex Caruso – The former Texas A&M guard went undrafted by the NBA in 2016. He played semi-pro for the Oklahoma City Blue of the NBA’s Development League and eventually worked his way onto the NBA rosters of the Los Angeles Lakers and, later, the Chicago Bulls.
OKC acquired Caruso via trade last summer. He quickly became the team’s defensive leader in slowing down the opponents’ top scoring guards.
Don’t forget about the coach!
The Oklahoma City Thunder’s head coach may be even more “invisible” than most of his players.
The 40-year old Mark Daigneault became the team’s head after his former boss, Billy Donovan, was fired.
Daigneault was the head coach of the NBA Development League’s Oklahoma City Blue for five seasons. He coached current OKC player Alex Caruso during one of those seasons.
Mark Daigneault was promoted to the OKC Thunder coaching staff in 2016. He succeeded Billy Donovan as the team’s head coach coinciding with the organization’s intentional rebuilding period in 2020.
Daigneault was named the NBA’s “Coach of the Year” last season in 2024.
Will Oklahoma City win their first NBA title soon?
The New York Knicks are trailing the Indiana Pacers 3-1 entering tonight’s game 5 in New York City. Both the Knicks and Pacers went 0-2 against OKC during the NBA’s regular season.
That doesn’t bode well for either team. Indiana (as highlighted here a couple of weeks ago) is playing to win the franchise’s first NBA title since joining the league in 1976.
The New York Knicks haven’t won an NBA title since Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe’s 1973 championship team.
Oklahoma City will have the home court advantage in the NBA Finals after posting the league’s best record.
They have one of the loudest home crowds in the league along with one of the most gritty defenses.
It will be difficult to stop the Thunder’s roll come June.