NBA season preview: Oklahoma City Thunder

The 2023-24 NBA season starts Tuesday! After considering the championship cases of the seven teams the Las Vegas sharps project at the top of the league, I decided to spend this week taking a closer look at a handful of squads I find particularly compelling. Our look at the five most interesting teams in the NBA — to me, if not necessarily to anyone else — with a hipster pick to click in Bricktown:

More often than not, when you hear people talk about “The Process,” they recall it as an interminable period of wandering through the wilderness — as Sam Hinkie gleefully lopping off a franchise’s limbs, then forcing what was left of the Philadelphia 76ers to toddle around like Monty Python’s Black Knight for a generation. Those people, though, misremember the facts. (Sometimes willfully.)

Those Sixers were obscenely bad … for three seasons. Then, they were just regular ol’ bad — thanks largely to Joel Embiid, the crown jewel of Hinkie’s gambit, missing the final 37 games with a torn meniscus — before cementing themselves as one of the best regular-season teams in the NBA. (Since 2017, only the Bucks have more wins.) The moral of the story: Even the most dire situations can turn around fast when you get the right guys on the court.

The situation sure seemed dire in Oklahoma City back in 2019. After Paul George decided he wanted to be a Clipper, Russell Westbrook decided he wanted to be a Rocket, and suddenly a Thunder franchise that had been a postseason constant for a decade faced the grim realization the only path back to the top started at the bottom. So general manager Sam Presti prepared everybody for a nosedive.

“This summer, the story of the Oklahoma City Thunder is transitioning to a new phase,” Presti wrote in a letter published in The Oklahoman on July 25, 2019. “… In saying goodbye to the past, we have begun to chart our future. The next great Thunder team is out there somewhere, but it will take time to seize and discipline to ultimately sustain.”

Time, discipline … and a whole boatload of trades aimed at A) gaining as much control as humanly possible over the NBA Draft through the end of the decade and B) finding the right young talent to place next to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the crown jewel of Presti’s gambit, and whose arrival in the PG-13 deal laid the first cornerstone in Oklahoma City’s rebuild.

Year 1 of the teardown: a surprise, playing-with-house-money 44-win playoff push behind short-timers Chris Paul, Danilo Gallinari and Dennis Schröder that might’ve come within a fingertip of the second round. Years 2 and 3: just 46 wins combined, as Gilgeous-Alexander and new head coach Mark Daigneault took the reins and started filling out the blueprint of the future with supporting-cast members like 6-foot-8 Australian point forward/inbound–passing savant Josh Giddey.

And then, last season, Year 4, it all started to come together.

A 16-win jump, with Gilgeous-Alexander establishing himself as a bona fide leading man en route to All-Star and All-NBA First Team selections. A rise to 16th in both offensive and defensive efficiency under Daigneault, who earned runner-up in Coach of the Year balloting for his work in getting so many young players to buy in so hard on the defensive end.

Do-it-all wing Jalen Williams looking like one of the steals of the 2022 draft, earning a spot in the starting lineup alongside Giddey and defensive demon Luguentz Dort, and finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting. The second-youngest team in the league winning a play-in game on the road, before bowing out to the Timberwolves one game shy of a full-fledged postseason berth.

There are plenty of reasons to believe the arrow will not only keep pointing north this season, but take on an aggressive skyward trajectory. For one thing, last year’s 40-42 Thunder squad underperformed its underlying stats a bit, thanks partly to a bottom-five record in “clutch” games (where the score was within five points in the final five minutes); by point differential, they performed more like a 43- or 44-win team. They could also reap the benefits of both continuity — the Thunder return all 11 players who logged at least 700 minutes for them last season — and critical infusions of new blood.

Nine years after the Process-era Sixers drafted him in the second round, Serbian vet Vasilije Micić will finally play in the NBA. The former EuroLeague MVP profiles as a plus playmaker and shooter off the bench for a Thunder team that scored at a bottom-three level when SGA was off the floor last season:

Most notably, though, there’s 2022 No. 2 overall pick Chet Holmgren, finally out of bubble wrap after missing his entire would-be rookie season with a Lisfranc fracture — and evidently pretty intent on making up for lost time.

“Every question seems to be about him,” Daigneault told reporters at Thunder media day. “There’s a lot of excitement about him.”

It’s not hard to understand why. The former Gonzaga All-American followed an eye-opening Summer League showing with a preseason that’s seen him score 37 points in 38 minutes, go toe-to-toe with fellow narrow king Victor Wembanyama and look an awful lot like the missing piece that completes the picture of a Thunder team that wants to play five-out, drive-and-kick offense with capable playmakers all over the court (the big fella’s got some juice off the dribble) while also improving upon last season’s rim protection (18th in conceding shots at the basket, 22nd in blocks per game) and success at finishing possessions (28th in defensive rebounding rate, dead last in second-chance points allowed).

Combine the additions of Holmgren, Micić and fellow rookie Cason Wallace (whom the Thunder targeted on draft night and who looks like a hand-in-glove fit in their tenacious perimeter core) with the other positive indicators from this summer — SGA’s ongoing ascent as arguably the best player at this summer’s FIBA World Cup, Giddey’s strong turn for Australia, J-Dub’s man-among-boys Summer League cameo — and Oklahoma City enters the season with justifiable optimism this will be the season that proves the next great Thunder team isn’t just “out there somewhere” anymore, but it has arrived.

Perhaps the most interesting question on the board, then: If that optimism bears out — if Oklahoma City spends the first few months of the season closer to the top of the West than the lower rungs of the play-in race — will Presti’s longest-view-in-the-room start to snap into a more immediate focus?

Even with all the young talent dotting OKC’s roster, the Thunder still have some semblance of control over as many 17 first-round picks and 19 second-round selections through 2030, precious little long-term guaranteed salary on the books outside of SGA’s more-than-fine max, a number of potentially excess-to-requirements prospects of interest (Tre Mann, Aleksej Pokuševski, Ousmane Dieng, et al.) and the moveable contracts of vets Victor Oladipo ($9.45 million, expires after this season) and Dāvis Bertāns ($17 million this season, with only $5 million of his $16 million 2024-25 salary guaranteed) to serve as salary-match ballast in a deal. Which is to say: If Presti wants to get involved in any trade talks that come across his transom, he’s got the war chest to do it. At the moment, though, that remains a big “if.”

“We don’t really know what we have right now,” Presti told reporters at Thunder media day. “I think this is part of the headwinds that you face as a young team. I wouldn’t want to cash in to become average or above average. … I don’t think you can make a rational case for [making a big star trade] now. Perhaps at some point when we have a little more information, the team has demonstrated its capability and played in high-performing games and we see what our limitations are.”

Patience is a virtue afforded to few teams in an NBA where contending windows seem to close faster and faster with each passing transaction cycle. And it’s one that Presti and Co. likely won’t be able to exercise forever — not with all those bright young supporting cast members approaching their post-rookie-scale paydays (most notably Giddey, who’s extension-eligible next summer) and the just-turned-25-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander about to enter the prime of his career.

For now, though, Oklahoma City has the best of both worlds: a roster teeming with players who should just keep getting better, a team with legitimate aspirations of postseason play … and, if their development isn’t linear and the road to contention veers off-course, seemingly endless pathways to get back on the right track. The Thunder may well own the NBA’s future; the fun part, though, will be seeing just how much of the present they can lay claim to while they’re waiting.