The Oklahoma City Thunder were not only one of the greatest NBA teams ever this past season, but they are also built to contend for a long time.
Don’t let Tyrese Haliburton‘s devastating injury in the first quarter of Sunday’s NBA Finals Game 7 distract you from the fact that this championship-winning Oklahoma City Thunder team should go down as one of the greatest teams of all time with the ability to go on a multi-year run that the NBA collective bargaining agreement was designed to deter.
Don’t believe it? The Thunder make quite a compelling case:
- OKC outscored its opponents by 1,243 points across the regular season and playoffs, the best point differential in a single season by any NBA team ever.
- The Thunder went 84-21 in 2024-25, including 68-14 in the regular season, joining the 1995-96 and 1996-97 Chicago Bulls and the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors as the only teams to ever win that many games in a season.
- Following the 21 games they lost this season, the Thunder went 19-2 in the next game, the greatest record after defeat of all time.
- OKC outscored its opponents by 259 points at home during the playoffs, a record, and forced 131 more turnovers than its opponents in the postseason, also a record.
- The Thunder’s league-leading defensive efficiency during the regular season was 2.5 points per 100 possessions better than the Orlando Magic, the second-place team in those rankings. The gap between OKC and Orlando was the largest top-two disparity in the 29-year history the NBA tracked this data, per NBA.com
- With an average age of 25.6, the Thunder fielded the second-youngest title-winning roster ever, only trailing the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers. They’re so young that Alex Caruso had to teach his neophyte teammates how to pop champagne during the postgame locker room celebration.
OKC’s 26-year-old superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the driving force behind this great juggernaut, joining Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the only players to ever win a championship, scoring title, and MVP in the same season. And he happens to be one of 15 Thunder players already under contract next season after the team won it all despite having the NBA’s fifth-lowest payroll, per Spotrac. No team in the last 15 years won a championship with a payroll ranked that low, largely because their other star players are still under rookie deals.
Chet Holmgren, who broke the record for blocked shots in a Game 7 with five on Sunday, has one more year on his rookie contract before he’s owed an extension as one of OKC’s defensive anchors. Despite missing 50 games with a hip injury, Holmgren’s unique rim protection and 3-point shooting as a 23-year-old standing 7-foot-1 makes him a matchup nightmare. And Jalen Williams, the 24-year-old versatile Scottie Pippen clone, just became the youngest player since Kobe Bryant to be All-NBA, All-Defense, an All-Star, and a champion in the same season. He, too, will have his rookie deal up after this season.
Once SGA, Holmgren, and Williams get their supermax and max contract extensions, however, the Thunder are going to get expensive. OKC will want to avoid the prohibitive second apron, which means it’ll need to cut costs in the future, potentially with Isaiah Hartenstein or Lu Dort once their contracts run out in two years. Genius general manager Sam Presti constructed his roster to mitigate the vastly increased costs of his three foundational players in two critical ways.
Presti signed four key rotation contributors to long, team-friendly extensions, led by Caruso’s four-year, $81 million deal that was worth every cent the way he ascended as a two-way menace during the playoffs. And Isaiah Joe‘s four-year, $48 million contract, Aaron Wiggins‘ five-year, $45 million pact, and Kenrich Williams‘ four-year, $27.1 million deal are all tradable and have team options in their final seasons.
The Thunder, under Presti’s leadership, have also become known as the team that consistently has a massive war chest of draft picks at their disposal through various trades, always trying to extract one extra asset that eventually accumulates over time. They have two first round picks on Wednesday, and multiple firsts each season through 2030 along with a silo of second rounders. These surplus selections helped Presti pick Williams, 21-year-old key contributor Cason Wallace, and teenage Serbian point guard Nikola Topić, the 12th pick in last year’s draft, who was injured this past season but will also be a cost-controlled factor moving forward.
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The plan is in place for Oklahoma City to have a title window far longer than current NBA rules would allow. For the first time in league history, there have been seven different champions, with cap rules preventing teams from carrying more than 2-3 max salary players at once. OKC boasts three young All-Star talents on both sides of the ball to build around, rotation veterans on long, team-friendly deals, a pipeline of young players ready to take the minutes of the vets who will eventually cycle out, and enough draft picks to keep this cycle going into the next decade if Presti continues to make all the right moves.
The Thunder not only built one of the greatest teams of all time this year, but they’re singularly built to last in the NBA’s new era of parity.
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