Shai Gilgeous-Alexander! Jalen Williams! Chet Holmgren! Sometimes they wear matching blue outfits in commercials! Other times they win NBA Championships! Sure, it wasn’t just them. Other players were on the team too. There was a bald guy named “Al.” But those three are the team’s “Big 3,” a concept modeled off of a time Sam Presti only ate half his six-piece McNuggets. “That’s all I needed,” he thought, “and that’s what this team needs.”
Again, the Oklahoma City Thunder won the NBA Finals. Shai was Mega-MVP this past season. Jalen Williams was All-NBA. Chet Holmgren has an overall disconcerting presence, but he’s really good at basketball by measures that people use. These players are connected to this city’s history now, and, as it turns out, the Thunder will pay what they’ve earned, what it takes to keep this trio together.
How much will that cost? If the contracts on Spotrac are to be believed, the Oklahoma City Thunder have locked in their Super Important Trio of Basketball Players (SITBP) for a grand total of $752,302,528 over the course of their extensions.
Jalen and Chet will be making $239,934,400 over five years once their new contracts kick in at the start of the 2026-2027 season. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be making $272,433,728 over four years starting at the beginning of 2027-28, assuming Canadians are still allowed in the country at that point.
It seems like paying players is expensive. Do we really have to do it?
Yes. Someone has probably asked that question genuinely.
Sure, there are other things you can do for $752 million. You could put it all in crypto, like Matt Damon wanted you to do two years ago. That would be a memorable experience. You could buy a WNBA franchise or start one. Sure, Tulsa took the Shock from my city and then turned them into what felt like mean-spirited parody of what the team once was, but maybe OKC can do better. Also, you could probably buy a lot of cows!
However, I would recommend the Oklahoma City Thunder pay their best players.
But I get it wanting to spend money elsewhere. With the way the current CBA is structured, it is very, very difficult to afford to keep a team together. The Oklahoma City Thunder are young, talented, deep and (as much as this pains me to say as someone who was mortified by the Supersonics leaving Seattle (Howard Schultz, I know your name.)) beloved by their fans to an inspiring degree. Seeing every damn person in the stands of the NBA Finals wearing a blue shirt was hypnotic. Surreal. Uncomfortable even. Oklahoma City has earned the title of a basketball city.
And one would like to see the fans who have grown to cherish these players rewarded for pouring their passion (and money, I guess) into the team. Fandom engenders real, valid feelings and important communal connections. It can be a way to form bonds. It can be a sandbox for extreme emotions that you can’t let out in other spaces. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander isn’t just the Oklahoma City point guard. He is the favorite player of hundreds of thousands of individual people with distinct lives, and their own personal experiences, and their own unique ways of thinking and interacting with the world. It’s pretty wild, if you think about it.
And as far as fanbases to interact with, OKC is pretty chill! I can’t really think of a bad experience I’ve had up until this point. One OKC fan I know picks produce. How cool is that? Anyway, we’ll see how chill they remain now that success is here. Warriors fans used to be normal. Can you believe that?
OKC deserves this trio. They deserve as much of this team they can get for as long as it can sustain. It really should come down to basketball concerns, whether or not a home-grown (mostly) group of basketball players evolving and succeeding together and continue to operate as the unit they’ve come to be. For a while now, OKC has done everything right.
But this offseason with the Boston Celtics proves that teams like this might be more fragile than we’d like to imagine. The repeater tax is bad. The second apron is scary. I feel like at one point, owning a professional sports team was just kind of a one-of-a-kind luxury item for the ultra-rich or the only-really-rich-but-super-passionate. Now it seems like teams are treated far more as financial investments. This is a choice, but it sure as hell isn’t one I have the power to make.
Why are you doing this to me? We just won a championship. I just want to be happy.
These extensions don’t kick in immediately. Broken hearts can heal sometimes. Don’t know what else to tell you.