Did the Thunder get too good, too fast?

No NBA team has gone from zero to dominant this quickly. So why isn't Oklahoma City getting the love it deserves?

The Thunder’s pivotal 2022 draft class. AP / Bryan Terry.

A couple of quick announcements before today’s main event.

First, we have a new hire to announce! Joseph George is now the Assistant Sports Analyst at Silver Bulletin. Joseph writes the NBA-focused newsletter The Zone Master, and has been an analyst for the Mexico City Capitanes of the NBA G League. He officially begins on July 1. Joseph beat out many other extremely talented candidates, and I’m grateful to him and to everyone who applied.¹

Second, I’m going to pick a morning next week for a ⚡ lightning round edition⚡ of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions. Paid subscribers can submit questions in the comments of SBSQ #21. As usual, any questions in the typical purview of the newsletter are fair game: politics, sports, poker, the newsletter business, AI, New York City, you name it. To avoid my usual tendency to go super long in responses, I’ll put myself on the clock, getting through as many questions as possible in ~2-3 hours.

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Three seasons ago, the Oklahoma City Thunder, rebuilding from a Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook-led era that peaked with a quick exit in the NBA Finals in 2012, went 24-58. None of their top eight players was more than 23 years old. They drew the right lottery balls for the 2nd pick in the NBA Draft, snagging Chet Holmgren, along with Jalen Williams later in the first round.

Two years ago, the Thunder were 40-42 — but actually a little pluckier than that, finishing with a positive point differential even as Holmgren was hurt in the preseason and took a gap year. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was suddenly a star, averaging 31.4 points per game. Still, nobody was prepared to anoint the Thunder a contender: they entered the 2023-24 season with +10000 odds (100:1 against) of winning the NBA Finals. Instead, with Holmgren making his debut and Williams blossoming, they finished with the #1 seed in the Western Conference at 57-25 before losing to Dallas in the Western Conference Semifinals.

And then this year, the Thunder were one of the best teams in NBA history, with a 68-14 record, the best point differential ever, an MVP Award for SGA, and then on Monday night, the first title in Thunder history.²

People are going to debate that clause — one of the best teams in NBA history. But this was an incredibly quick rise, too quick for some fans to appreciate. And it probably wasn’t any sort of fluke. The NBA has a long season — maybe too long considering the increasing number of injuries to players in their primes — and it’s a low-variance sport. (The better team usually wins when each team gets ~100 possessions per game.) So the numbers mostly speak for themselves over the course of the 105 regular-season-plus-playoff games that the Thunder played.

In fact, this year’s Thunder were one of just 11 members of what I’ll call the 65-and-10 club: teams to win at least 65 regular season games with a double-digit scoring differential. Nine of those 11 teams went on to win the title, the exceptions being the 2015-16 Spurs — who ironically lost to the Thunder in the Western Conference Semifinals — and in the same season, the infamous 73-9 Warriors, who blew a 3-1 lead to LeBron’s Cavs and were so chafed about it that they went out and acquired Durant.

True, the Thunder endured seven losses in the post-season, some of which were hard to stomach — a choke job in Game 1 against Denver in the Western Conference Semis, and then a blowout loss to the Pacers in a closeout Game 6 in which they trailed by 30 points after the third quarter. But Michael Jordan’s 1992 Bulls also lost seven games en route to their second title. The Thunder won whenever it mattered, losing back-to-back games just twice in the regular season and zero times in the playoffs.

It’s also true that OKC had its share of injury luck: the defending champions and preseason title favorites, the Boston Celtics, lost to the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Semifinals after Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles³, and then Tyrese Haliburton also gruesomely tore his Achilles in the first quarter of Game 7 on Monday night. None of this was the Thunder’s fault, and for that matter, they weren’t fully healthy themselves, with Holmgren limited to 32 regular season games.

Still, it’s enough to create a perception that the Thunder won the championship for 70 cents on the dollar, perhaps somewhat like the Lakers’ title in the NBA bubble in 2020. On his podcast after the game on Monday night, Bill Simmons said within the first minute that “I think this might be first NBA playoffs that comes and goes where the team I’m going to remember isn’t the team that won the title.”

Not that Simmons is a Thunder hater exactly.⁴ Still, Haliburton’s injury, plus the trade of Durant to the Houston Rockets on Monday afternoon⁵, abutted into their victory lap and might provide the excuse to treat OKC’s championship as just one item on a list of bullet points in the never-ending NBA news cycle. In some ways, in fact, the NBA flywheel feels more and more like the political news cycle where it’s hard to tell what matters and what doesn’t. But titles matter, or at least they ought to. Perhaps the Rockets went from something like a 5 percent chance to a 12 percent chance of winning next year’s championship, for instance, after acquiring KD. But the Thunder just won this year’s title with 100 percent certainty.

And the Thunder do have their haters, not that they should care. They are not only one of the better NBA champions, they’re also the second-youngest. And they have arguably the best stash of draft assets in the league⁶. In an era where league rules are incredibly punitive to sustaining even homegrown success, they are nevertheless set up as well as any franchise ever to reel off a string of championships. But I have a theory for why the Thunder aren’t quite getting the love that they deserve.

The NBA is a “prove it” league

I have no particular connection to Oklahoma City; in fact, Oklahoma is one of just four states that I’ve never been to.⁷ But I like making winning sports bets, and aware of track record of teams that perform this strongly in the regular season, I placed various futures wagers on OKC over the course of the year, first at about the half-way point of the regular season, then again at the start of the playoffs, then again after the Celtics fell behind 3-1 to the Knicks.

I’m also aware that playoff inexperience can be a detriment — in fact, this was incorporated into the projections that we ran at FiveThirtyEight. So I expected a few bumps in the road in the playoffs of exactly the sort that OKC endured. I just thought the signs of elite performance were enough to outweigh those concerns. You might win 64 games almost by accident as a merely very good team, as this year’s Cavs did. But you don’t win 68 and have a +12.8 point differential unless you’re all-time elite. There are just too many ways to lose regular-season games — on the tail end of back-to-backs, or when you shoot 7-41 one night from three. To be that many standard deviations above the mean, you really have something going.

I didn’t bet the Thunder at the start of the season, though maybe I should have. They entered the season at +675 to win it all, meaning a $100 wager would have returned a $675 profit — about the same price as the Knicks! But one of the themes I’ve discussed in the previous two installments of what’s now become an annual Silver Bulletin tradition, a celebration of the new NBA champion — see my piece on the Nuggets here from 2023 and the Celtics here from 2024 — is that NBA fans probably go too far in defaulting to the familiar.

If you look at past preseason odds — Basketball Reference has them dating back to 1985 — all but 2 of the 17 previous champions to enter the regular season with +250 title odds or lower had recently won a championship. Even for franchises that later proved to be dynasties, however, the betting public was initially skeptical. The 2015 Warriors went into their championship season at +2800. Jordan’s Bulls were +700 in 1991, slightly worse than this year’s Thunder.

Of course, betting on newcomers has been a more winning strategy lately now that the NBA has had six distinct champions in six seasons (although the 2022 Warriors count as a carryover from 2018 for “recent repeater” status). But NBA history isn’t that long, and the structure of the league is changing, making sustained success harder to achieve. If you’re building a model, it’s wise to give some extra championship equity to veteran teams that may pace themselves in the regular season. But fans and bettors may be overindexing to the presence of a small handful of dynasties in the fossil record, like the Warriors and the Bulls, who may have been subtly lucky in their own ways⁸ and who played in a less competitive league under conditions that no longer exist. If you started from more of a clean slate — the Thunder were already very good last year, they were very young, and they added two key rotation pieces in Isaiah Hartenstein and Alex Caruso — they should probably at least have been co-favorites with the Celtics. Certainly not relegated to second-tier status with the likes of the Knicks.

To be fair, though, the Thunder are somewhat literally off the charts. Weighted by regular-season minutes played, the team was just 24.8 years old this season. (Historically, NBA players peak at about age 27, but the timelines may be extending due to modern sports medicine.) Only the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers were a younger champion (24.5 years old), but they went just 49-33 in a literal dark era for the league⁹. Nobody else is particularly close. No team ever has been this good, this young, this fast.

But if you scroll through that chart, you can see some patterns emerging. For the past 11 seasons, dating back to the Warriors’ first title of the Steph Era in 2015, the average NBA champion has been 27.6 years old. By contrast, in the 30 seasons before that, from 1985 through 2014, the average champion was 28.9. It’s not a huge shift — a difference of just 15 months — but it matters at the margin that NBA teams (and NBA bettors) operate at.

The increasing intensity of the regular season, and the increasing strictness of the league’s various salary caps and aprons, render it all but a necessity to have at least some prime contributors who are either on their rookie-scale contracts (like Williams and Holmgren) or at least on their initial rookie extensions (like SGA). Youth and depth are in — the success of the Pacers will also contribute to that trend — and the era of the veteran “superteam” is probably out, as evidenced by the cheap price that the Rockets paid for KD after the king’s ransom forsaken by the Suns for him.

The Thunder skipped their rite of passage

It might have helped the Thunder perception-wise if they’d faced either Steph’s Warriors (assuming he was healthy) or LeBron’s Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. Not that these teams were actually any better than the Timberwolves, whom the Thunder dispatched in five games. But like in almost no other sport, NBA teams are expected to endure a rite of passage, perhaps initially being sacrifices to elder dynasties before earning respect for themselves. Jordan’s Bulls lost in the opening round three times, then the semifinals to the Pistons in 1988, then the Eastern Conference Finals twice (also to Detroit) before eventually reaching the promised land. The Celtics had several near-misses before their title last season. Even LeBron’s Miami Heat needed two chances, losing in an upset to the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 before winning the title the next year.

The major exception to this is the Warriors: they went 23-43 in the NBA’s lockout-shortened 2011-12 season (which equates to 29 wins per 82 regular season games) but then were dominant by 2014-15, their first season under Steve Kerr, winning 67 regular season games and the Finals. Their trajectory isn’t quite so linear as for the Thunder, but it’s close.

And here, it is worth acknowledging that the Warriors were more of a viral sensation than OKC was. There are a lot of intangible factors behind this. Steph is one of the most beloved players ever, while SGA and the rest of Thunder are kind of square. (Even now, Steph is still #1 in jersey sales whereas Gilgeous-Alexander is 11th). They play in a small market for a franchise that’s fully rebranded from its bitter end as the Seattle SuperSonics. They’re sometimes accused of tanking, but that isn’t really fair: the Thunder only had two truly bad seasons, and the only real lottery luck they received was with the Holmgren pick; everyone else way overperformed their draft slot (or not being drafted at all, in the case of Lu Dort). In all of this, there may also be some element of jealousy verging on fear: the potential dominance of the Thunder could wreck every other franchise’s championship hopes.

But also, the world has changed, even from a decade ago. Sports, and particularly the NBA with its dynastic franchises, are a place we go to look for familiarity when there’s so little of it in other parts of our lives. Tom Brady won three Super Bowl rings under George W. Bush, two under Barack Obama, one in Trump’s first term, and his final one in Tampa under Joe Biden. There’s nothing like that now. The closest replacements for him in the American sports landscape are Steph and LeBron — #1 and #2 in jersey sales — but they’re more like the bands still playing to sold-out arenas even if they’re clearly past their primes, with fans mostly looking for renditions of their old hits rather than whatever new material they’ve come up with. Meanwhile, the box office, another source of escape, is completely dominated by movie mega-franchises. Even the rare exceptions, like Barbie in 2023 or A Complete Unknown last year, are often awash in nostalgia.

If Hollywood had scripted it, this year’s Finals would have had a more sympathetic champion: probably the Pacers (a redux of Hoosiers?) or even the Knicks. That would have set the Thunder up for a redemption arc next season. In time, NBA fans will come to fully appreciate everything that OKC accomplished; familiarity breeds contempt, but also respect. Instead, they’ll enter next season still with a chip on their shoulders — but a ‘chip already in the bag.

1. Our immediate goals for the summer are to get at least a couple of sports models back up and running for the fall. There are no further imminent hiring plans, but I’m going to take a couple of months here with me, Eli and Joseph and see if it might then make sense to hire for some sort of editor position. Despite appearances — or who are we kidding, I’m sure this is obvious — Silver Bulletin is currently something of a mom-and-pop operation. While I have no intention of recreating the FiveThirtyEight days, I’d like to get to the point where between articles, models and data-driven features, it always feels like there’s something fresh on the site, including in periods when I have travel, model work or other competing responsibilities. We recently passed 300,000 total (paid + free) subscribers, and I greatly appreciate your support.

2. Though not technically in franchise history. The Thunder inherited the title won by the 1978-79 Seattle SuperSonics, although NBA will probably disown it from the Thunder once Seattle inevitably gets an expansion team.

3. Though the Knicks were up 2-1 in the series and also ahead in Game 4 at the time of Tatum’s injury; they were probably going to win anyway.

4. We worked together at ESPN, and I remain a big Bill fan. And as I discussed in a previous newsletter, he’s one of those people who validated my perception that SGA is on track to become an all-time great player.

5. I’m not a huge KD guy but I stil love this for the Rockets.

6. Though they’ve been devalued somewhat by the Thunder’s success: their own picks are no longer worth much.

7. The others are Alaska, Alabama and Montana.

8. Like the salary cap greatly expanding in the year that Durant became a free agent — or Jordan fading a 10 percent risk of a career-ending injury.

9. And their chances for any kind of sustained success were ruined by a devastating injury to Bill Walton in the next season’s playoffs.