The Oklahoma City Thunder with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook will go down as one of the most dominant teams to never win a title.
With his decision to join the Golden State Warriors, Kevin Durant has marked the end of an era of basketball for the Oklahoma City Thunder. During his nine seasons with the team, eight which were alongside Russell Westbrook, the Thunder won at least 60 percent of their games in six separate seasons, and at least 70 percent of their games four times. And for all that winning they have a Durant-shaped hole at small forward and a collection of frustrating playoff losses — including an NBA Finals appearance in 2011-12 that seemed to be the beginning of a dynasty.
The thing is, even without the championship ring, it feels fair to call the Durant/Westbrook Thunder a dynasty. They were perennial contenders for more than half-a-decade, a fairly remarkable run in the modern NBA. If not for injuries, bad luck, and one hot shooting quarter from Klay Thompson, they might very well have won a title. That is the unfortunate nature of the NBA — an incredible thin line between winning and losing.
To place this Thunder run in context, and how much their greatness will likely be obscured by the unfortunate end results, I pulled together a list of the best dynasties to have never won a title. To identify dynasties I used the technique Todd Whitehead outlined in this piece at Nylon Calculus:
"I used the simple rating system—a team’s point differential adjusted for its strength of schedule—to evaluate the success of each individual season in NBA history (data available from Basketball-Reference).Next, I defined a dynasty as any stretch of consecutive seasons during which a franchise maintained an adjusted point differential of +2.5 per game or better, a definition which is roughly equivalent to consecutive seasons as a Top-10 team in the League.Finally, I ranked the NBA dynasties by summing yearly adjusted point differentials over the various dynastic periods to produce a “dynasty score.” So, for example, a team that posted adjusted point differentials of +1, +3, +5, +3, and +1 for a five year stretch would be defined as a three-year dynasty and would receive a dynasty score of 3 + 5 + 3 = 11."
Looking at just teams which played in the three-point era (1979-present), I found 45 teams that managed that level of performance over at least two consecutive seasons without winning a title in any of the consecutive seasons. Just 29 teams were able to sustain it across three or more seasons without winning a title. Using Whitehead’s technique for assessing the strength of those teams, here are the greatest dynasties of the three-point era to have not won a title.
The Durant/Westbrook Thunder fall in the middle of this top-tier of extended success without a title, however, their numbers are slightly lower because of the methodology. The rules I used here ends the Thunder’s dynasty at the 2014-15 season because their SRS that season was 2.47 (just below the 2.5 threshold). If we rounded up and included that season, their dynasty would include both that season and the 2015-16 season, bringing their dynasty to seven full seasons and a total of 40 dynasty points. That leap would bring them up to that very top-tier group, just behind the Phoenix Suns of the late 90s.
There are more than a few memorable teams in here but perhaps no one suffered more than the Utah Jazz with Karl Malone and John Stockton. You’ll notice them in the top spot, but also at the bottom of the table as well. Their SRS in 1992-93 was 1.47, a blip which divided into two sections what would otherwise have been a 14-season run, accumulating 72 dynasty points. They had the unfortunate luck of running up against Michael Jordan but also overlapping with three other Western Conference dynasties here — the Portland Trail Blazers, Phoenix Suns, and the Seattle Supersonics — for parts of their run.
Each of these teams was undone by a certain set of templates — untimely injuries, a stroke or strokes of bad luck, and a group of teams just equal to or a little bit better. The San Antonio Spurs and Los Angeles Lakers were the foils for the 2000-2008 Dallas Mavericks, a collection of some of the best offensive teams of all time. Ditto for the ringless Steve Nash and his Seven-Seconds-or-Less-Suns. And the run-and-gun Sacramento Kings. Dwight Howard’s Orlando Magic ran into LeBron’s Cavs and Garnett’s Celtics.
The only team on this list with hope of escaping permanent residence is the Los Angeles Clippers. Five seasons into their run, the level of difficulty has kept increasing and their challenge is now to somehow make it past the Golden State Warriors with Kevin Durant.
And that Durant-Westbrook pairing has now run it’s course. Like the rest of this group, their history is filled with quivering forks in the road, the bad timing of injuries (to Westbrook, Durant, and Ibaka), a monumental trade (so long James Harden), and historically elite opponents (Spurs, Warriors, Clippers). This era of Oklahoma City Thunder basketball will ultimately be defined but what was not: NBA champions. But it’s still worth remembering for what it was: pretty damn good.
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