Why Can’t This Be the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Year?

NBA pundits don’t believe in the Oklahoma City Thunder. They deemed Oklahoma City “the weakest no. 1 seed that we’ve seen in a very long time.” They thought multiple play-in teams could beat the Thunder in the 1-8 matchup in the first round. They—or, should I say, we, because Ringer analysts are no exception—view the second-round Timberwolves-Nuggets showdown as the de facto Western Conference finals.

To some extent, it’s reasonable that folks would doubt the NBA’s second-youngest team (older only than the 22-60 Spurs), which doubles as the youngest team in league history to win a playoff series. These Thunder haven’t been here before and flash a couple of glaring weaknesses in a competitive conference.

Yet, after a 117-95 win over the Mavericks on Tuesday, the Thunder are now 5-0 in the playoffs, with an average margin of victory of 17 points per game. Perhaps I’m biased because I’ve believed in the Thunder’s potential since the start of the season—but the evidence keeps piling up that the small, young, inexperienced Thunder are already legitimate contenders to reach the Finals.

In the regular season, the Thunder led the NBA in 3-point percentage. They led the NBA in lowest opponent accuracy at the rim, per Cleaning the Glass. They led the NBA in turnovers forced, transition points scored, and transition points allowed.

All those individual strengths added up to the third-ranked offense and fourth-ranked defense. Those teamwide plaudits come along with the presence of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, an MVP finalist, and Mark Daigneault, one of the best tactical coaches in the league.

The Thunder haven’t slowed at all in the playoffs. In the first round, Oklahoma City swept New Orleans by a total of 63 points across four games—the ninth-largest margin for a first-round sweep since the first round moved to a best-of-seven format. (The Timberwolves’ plus-60 margin over Phoenix this spring ranks 11th on that list.)

Sure, the Thunder benefited from some help to run up the score. The Pelicans were without Zion Williamson (though they thrived in his off-court minutes in the regular season), and they were unlucky to miss so many open 3-pointers against OKC. But early-round dominance is an important barometer for title teams, and the Thunder also added another playoff blowout to their ledger on Tuesday, crushing the Mavericks in Game 1 of a series purported to give them a greater challenge.

Still, concerns persist about the Thunder’s bona fides, especially when compared to the defending champion Nuggets and the Timberwolves team currently destroying them. So let’s examine four myths about the things that might stop OKC’s unprecedented playoff run—and then explain why they might not.

The myth: The Oklahoma City Thunder are too young and inexperienced to win.

If the Thunder make a deep playoff run this season, they’ll do so after having skipped a lot of steps. Michael Jordan’s Bulls set the standard: Get a taste of the playoffs but lose in the first round, then advance to the second round, then hit the wall in the conference finals a couple of times, and only then, with all that experience in tow, break through to win the title.

For contrast, before this season, the Thunder hadn’t reached the playoffs since the 2020 bubble, and they hadn’t won a playoff series since Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook led the way in 2016.

At the same time, all five starters for the 2023-24 Thunder are 25 years old or younger, and the team has an average age of just 23.4 (according to Basketball-Reference, which weights by minutes played). No under-24 team has ever won the title before, and the only under-25 team to win—the 1976-77 Trail Blazers, with an average age of 24.5—did so long ago, in the first post-merger season, when the NBA was a very different league.

The reality: Nobody this young has ever won before because nobody this young has ever been this good before.

Since the introduction of the shot clock in the mid-1950s, 33 teams have finished the season with an average age younger than 24. Those 33 have almost all been terrible, with an average record of 28-54 and a minus-5.1 point differential. Expand the sample to the 191 under-25 teams in NBA history and the results aren’t much better, with an average 30-52 record and a minus-3.9 point differential.

In fact, these Thunder are only the fourth team with an average age below 24 to reach the playoffs. But the good news is that their three predecessors (in some cases, literal predecessors) acquitted themselves well on the playoff stage:

• 2011 Thunder (no. 4 seed): reached conference finals, lost to eventual champion Mavericks
• 2010 Thunder (no. 8 seed): lost first round, on a Game 6 Pau Gasol buzzer-beater, to eventual champion Lakers
• 1978 Bucks (no. 6 seed): won first-round upset, lost 4-3 in second round

And the current Thunder, with Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams, are much better than any of the three teams on that bullet-pointed list. The 2023-24 Thunder won 57 games with a plus-7.4 point differential. The second-best under-24 team in NBA history was the 2010-11 Thunder, who won 55 games with a plus-3.8 point differential. The records are close, but the current Thunder team has a point differential that is essentially double that of the previous edition.

(More specifically, this Thunder team is better overall, despite lesser individual talent, than the 2010-11 version. For instance, I will be surprised if all three of Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren, and Williams go on to win MVP awards, as the Thunder’s original Big Three did—but I’d also be surprised if Sam Presti traded one of them in a year or two, like he did with Harden.)

With that kind of foundation, it seems plausible that the Thunder would experience exponential, rather than linear, progress in the playoffs. They’re already breaking records as the youngest team to win a playoff series. What are a few more records—like the youngest team to reach the conference finals—of the same variety?

The myth: The Thunder’s rebounding woes will be their doom.

Oklahoma City plays with a five-out style, but the trade-off of an approach that emphasizes shooting, transition play, and points off turnovers is the occasional beatdown on the defensive glass. The Thunder have the league’s lightest team and finished the regular season ranked 29th in defensive rebounding rate, per CtG. This narrative is so ingrained that the Inside the NBA crew critiqued the Thunder’s rebounding at halftime of Game 1 against Dallas—even though OKC had more offensive rebounds than Dallas at that point.

When it looks bad—such as when Pelicans center Jonas Valanciunas collected nine offensive rebounds by himself in a close Game 1 loss—it looks really bad. An inability to close defensive possessions is about as visually glaring and disheartening a flaw as exists in basketball, like an NFL defense that can’t get off the field on third down.

A preliminary review of the history of bad rebounding teams says this issue is also a major impediment to playoff success. Before this season, 51 teams this century reached the playoffs despite a regular-season defensive rebounding rate at least 1.5 percentage points worse than league average, according to an analysis of Basketball-Reference data. Only nine of those 51 teams (18 percent) reached the conference finals, while the vast majority lost in the first round.

The reality: Rebounding is overrated—and the Thunder aren’t that terrible, anyway.

Statistician Dean Oliver’s “Four Factors” calculate that rebounding is only half as important as shooting (as measured by effective field goal percentage) and slightly less important than turnovers in terms of how much it affects a team’s ability to win a game. And the Thunder dominate those more essential categories. Here are their ranks in those stats, per CtG:

• Offensive eFG%: third in regular season, third in playoffs
• Defensive eFG%: fourth in regular season, first in playoffs
• Offensive turnover rate: third in regular season, fifth in playoffs
• Defensive turnover rate: first in regular season, first in playoffs

Pretty good! And the evidence suggests this trade-off works for the Thunder, who, after all, have held their playoff opponents below 100 points in every game thus far.

It also helps that the Thunder have improved their rebounding efforts over the course of the season. After the All-Star break, they ranked 12th in defensive rebounding rate, and in the first round of the playoffs, they ranked a respectable 10th out of 16 teams. Fun fact: Dallas had a lower defensive rebounding rate in the first round than OKC did. And in Game 1 on Tuesday, the Thunder grabbed 16 offensive rebounds to the Mavericks’ 11.

Moreover, that aforementioned history of poor rebounding teams is extremely misleading. Most of this century’s rebounding laggards were 6-, 7-, and 8-seeds—so they wouldn’t have been expected to win in the first round anyway. If we instead limit our analysis to bad rebounding teams that secured top-three seeds, then we find that nine of 11 reached at least the conference finals.

In other words, bad rebounding is a problem—but if a team was able to overcome that issue over the course of 82 regular-season games to win consistently, then it will probably be able to keep winning in the playoffs, too.

The myth: The Thunder will be in trouble when opposing defenses target Josh Giddey.

This is a more granular potential problem rather than a general commentary on the Thunder’s roster. If the playoffs are in large part about hunting specific players and game-planning against specific lineups, then guard Giddey poses an obvious target for every Thunder opponent.

If defenses guard Giddey with a center and sag off him, the thinking goes, they can either force more 3-point attempts from a shaky shooter or muck up the rest of an offense that’s playing four-on-five. It’s the Warriors’ Tony Allen strategy from 2015, except employed against a non-elite defender.

The reality: Mark Daigneault isn’t afraid to adjust.

The Mavericks went right after Giddey in Game 1, lining center Daniel Gafford across from him—but it’s not as if that defensive gambit were a surprise. The Thunder have known that this tactic was coming in the playoffs—and, increasingly, faced it in the regular season—for months now. This lead time allowed Daigneault to develop some wrinkles, like the guard-guard screens he’s always loved, to take advantage of opponents’ oddly aligned defenses.

Or he can just nip this issue in the bud entirely by taking Giddey off the floor because he is the Thunder’s least important starter, the Thunder have a good bench, and all of the potential replacements are ace 3-point shooters who can better stretch out the defense.

On another team, Giddey might be a more central figure, but on a Thunder squad already overflowing with creative on-ball talents, he’s more of a luxury addition. OKC doesn’t need him to dominate. When Gilgeous-Alexander played without Giddey in the regular season, the Thunder outscored their opponents by 11.8 points per 100 possessions, per PBP Stats. And in 221 minutes with a different fifth man next to SGA, Williams, Holmgren, and Lu Dort, OKC’s net rating was a robust plus-10.7 (versus plus-10.3 with the starting lineup).

Daigneault has employed a quicker hook in the playoffs. Giddey played only 26.5 minutes per game against the Pelicans, while every other starter averaged at least 32.

And in Game 1 against Dallas, Giddey played only 17 minutes, fewer than Cason Wallace (23) and Aaron Wiggins (23) and slightly more than Isaiah Joe (15). The Thunder went on several big runs with Giddey on the bench; single-game plus-minus isn’t a reliable stat, but it sure confirms my priors that Giddey was the only Thunder player with double-digit minutes who had a negative on-court differential in the game.

The myth: The Thunder’s positive metrics are skewed by their health.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Thunder detractors talk much about this point—but they should! This claim has more merit than any of the others. All five Thunder starters played at least 71 games in the regular season, and Joe, Wallace, and Wiggins all appeared in at least 78.

According to Spotrac data, the Thunder lost only 61 player games because of injury this season. The Timberwolves (73) were the only other team below triple digits, while the average team was up above 200 games lost.

The Thunder’s aberrant health would have naturally inflated their regular-season stats—but in the playoffs, they won’t have the nightly advantage they enjoyed with a mostly healthy squad from October through March.

The reality: The Thunder are still uniquely healthy (knock on wood).

First, a caveat that past health is not a guarantee of future health—the Thunder are always one twisted Gilgeous-Alexander ankle away from disaster. Last season, the Kings were the healthiest regular-season team, but De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis both had to play through injuries in the playoffs.

But in a 2024 postseason largely defined by injuries thus far, it’s worth something to be the league’s youngest team with a strong track record of health. Some would-be contenders, like the Bucks and Clippers, have already been eliminated because injuries torpedoed their seasons. The Knicks, Cavaliers, and Celtics—and likely the Mavericks, Nuggets, and Pacers, too, assuming Luka Doncic, Jamal Murray, and Tyrese Haliburton aren’t at 100 percent—are all dealing with injuries to All-Star-level players right now.

In contrast, the Thunder and Timberwolves were the healthiest teams in the regular season, and at least at the moment, they’re the healthiest playoff squads, too. It might not be a coincidence that they’re the two remaining undefeated teams in the postseason.

And now they might be on a collision course for the Western Conference finals, which would represent a fascinating matchup of two small-market teams that built very different rosters through very different means. Oklahoma City split four meetings with Minnesota in the regular season. (The Thunder also beat the Nuggets and Mavericks 3-1 apiece, though player absences make those results difficult to parse.)

In part because Minnesota has looked so dominant in the playoffs, the Thunder might still be a year away from being favored in that potential matchup. The 2010-11 Thunder represent the best comp for this new Thunder squad, and they fell in the conference finals before winning the conference a year later.

But for a team seemingly set up so well to win in coming seasons, with so many incoming picks and so much promising youth, Oklahoma City’s chances at winning right now, earlier than anyone expected, are still underrated. The greatest myth might be that the Thunder are the team of the future; the reality would be that they’re also the team of the present.