People are worried about the Thunder. Not because they're falling apart, exactly the opposite. They're 14-1, the best team in the NBA by a wide margin, and there's a good chance they could end up with two more lottery picks this season, one in the top three.
To be clear, the Oklahoma City Thunder are not the Process Sixers. They get that comparison because of the almost comical pursuit of draft picks to begin their rebuilds and the wealth of young talent they amassed. (They still have six first-round picks coming in the next two drafts). But they did it very differently and, thus far, have generated very different results.
If anything, the Oklahoma City Thunder … like … I don’t know. They were just normal? Like, exceedingly boring, and patient, and normal?
If you had to ask someone to rattle off the basic strategy for building a championship team in a small market, it would go something like this:
- Weave your team into the community at large so that your fans and your city are personally invested in the success of the franchise and the players themselves, whoever they are.
- Build through the draft because a small-market team is rarely a destination for championship-leading free agents.
- Work in the margins. An extra second round pick every other trade, over the course of a couple years, becomes a first. (Or so. I don’t know the exchange rate, sorry.)
- Pretend you didn’t steal the Supersonics, if that applies.
- Be patient. Trust yourself enough to be patient. Eventually, someone you don’t see as part of your future will spike their trade value. Eventually, another team will be looking for the right player to fill a gap. Eventually, another GM will be looking to save his job with a win-now move. If you did the prior steps right, you should have plenty of tools at your disposal to give your poor peer what they think they need.
- Be “helpful” to franchises in a crisis.
These rules lead to conversations that look like these:
“We can make a trade to go from being bad to near mediocre, should we?”
“No.”
“One of our best players isn’t happy in a way we probably can’t fix short of bringing in short term additions, but we can get someone promising and/or future picks for him. Should we?”
“Yes.”
“Team kinda sucks right now. We’re probably going to lose tonight. Do you think we’re going to get fired?”
“No.”
“Wow. Our team is good enough to win a championship right now and we still have tons of assets. Should we make a consolidation trade for fun?”
“lol, heck no”
In the case of Oklahoma City, there weren’t any interviews with key conceptual architects lauding ‘being bad on purpose for a long time’ as a disruptive strategy. It never really was in the first place. Sam Presti felt his tenure was not max three-to-four years like Nico Harrison did.
Oklahoma City had a couple years when things were gross. Like, notably gross. There were calls on podcasts and Twitter and other places that words happen that if you’re not going to play Shai then you should trade him. Random players having near triple doubles seemed to keep happening. Poku.
But they got better. And then when they started getting better, they didn’t immediately think, “we need to get more better right now.”
They made a 16-win jump in the 2022-23 season to get into the play-in after fighting for a top spot in the lottery the year before. They had been collecting assets for a while now. Maybe this is the time to package some picks together and bring in someone to take them to the playoffs?
They didn’t do that. Instead, in the 2023-24 season, they jumped another 17 wins to take the one seed. They looked quite clearly like one of the top three teams in the West from early in the year. When they didn’t make the Western Conference Finals, it almost seemed like they weren’t quite all there. Was this the time to make a consolidation trade? Would that take them over the top as a true contender.
They didn’t do that either. They just won a championship instead, while holding onto everyone and everything. And now have all the picks in the world going forward.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are better defined by what they didn’t do
The Oklahoma City Thunder just waited. They didn’t allow themselves to take big swings and potentially make massive mistakes. They were risk-averse and wary. They had more hits (Giddey for Caruso) than misses (anything for Gordon Hayward). The GM had the cache to feel safe in his position (you draft three MVPs, you should have tenure, in my opinion). The fans stayed attached.
It was just the perfect example of continually doing the work and getting the little things right over a long period of time with the trust that the proc ...
no.
... the belief that the framework would work out in the end. Congratulations to the Oklahoma City Thunder on winning the 2025 NBA Championship.
None of those would be possible without every other team
Because as fun as it would be to list out all of Presti’s trades to this moment, they most frequently amount to the accumulation of picks. Good picks, bad picks, all sorts of picks. But picks. Every team gets the same amount of them. If you have more than other teams, that’s because other teams gave them to you. This happened a lot through the generosity of all sorts of teams in all sorts of situations at all different times.
The most prominent player who was already in the league whom Presti acquired through trade was Shai, and it wasn’t long ago that the conversations around him were “is Shai good enough to be an All-Star?” Which is awesome, but still. That trade wasn’t a consolidation move or one-for-one talent swap. The trade largely can be described as “get anyone good we can because Paul George doesn’t want to be here anymore. Danilo can come too.”
That 2019 trade kind of set everything off. We know how it worked out in terms of the players exchanged from our perspective years later, but outside of Chris Paul accidentally making the Thunder good for a bit immediately, every executive move was about being good later. Time kept moving, and they kept accumulating moments in the future where a good thing would happen. And eventually, the era shifted. Now the moments that in the past were considered the future were the present. The later was suddenly today.
Because over the course of five, six years, other teams continually let OKC be the more patient one. Short-term decisions over the long-term. When other fanbases needed an injection of excitement now, OKC could wait. When other GMs needed an improvement over last year to keep their job over the summer, OKC could facilitate. When other teams would call about the young players they wanted to keep, OKC believed in their scouting. It’s almost as if Oklahoma City was the one franchise that remained calm in a league-wide fit of mass hysteria.
And now the Thunder are the best team in the league. And they have all your picks.