The Thunder took six NBA Finals games and an additional two and a half quarters to prove it, but Oklahoma City rounded into championship form just in time.
With thousands of Thunder supporters shaking the Paycom Center stands in approval, Oklahoma City responded to a slight halftime deficit in Game 7 by burying the underdog Pacers with a 19-2 run across the third and fourth quarters. By the time the dust had cleared on the Thunder’s punishing stretch, NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and OKC had assumed firm control of the game and the series with a commanding 90-71 lead.
Indiana, without playoff hero Tyrese Haliburton due to a hamstring injury in the first quarter, closed its deficit to 10 in the final three minutes. But the Thunder, and its unrelenting fanbase, denied the Pacers a miracle comeback in an Indiana postseason run that has been full of them.
When the Game 7 clock expired with a 103-89 final score and crowned the Thunder NBA champions, nearly all of the members of the Thunder’s young and talented rotation secured their first NBA titles. If you can set aside the cringeworthy ads featuring OKC’s big names that run on loop every postseason ad break, the Thunder’s lineup featured a cast of likeable characters, from emerging superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to defensive stalwart Chet Holmgren to scrappy guard Alex Caruso (who also won in 2020 with the Lakers), each of whom put it all on the line for a championship. And beyond the sheer feel-good factor, the Thunder deserved to win a title: back-to-back seasons with the best record and top seed in the Western Conference and impeccable roster management and drafting the past half-decade.
Amid all the smiles in the confetti shower, the greatest feel-good story belonged to the stands, and to the state of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma City has never been regarded as a premier destination for the nation’s best athletes and has relied on college programs like Oklahoma and Oklahoma State for the majority of its greatest sporting moments, but since the Thunder arrived in a controversial relocation in 2008, OKC has welcomed its NBA franchise with open arms and developed a dedicated fanbase, one deserving of a championship on its own merit.
Sunday evening’s Game 7 victory was Oklahoma’s long-awaited reward, a game that validated a long-overlooked region’s merits as a community that not only sustained a pro sports franchise but formed a dominant champion.
While next-door neighbor Texas has birthed dynasties at the college and professional levels for decades, Oklahoma has long been an afterthought, especially at the pro level. Exposure to the Big Four sports leagues was sparse: the then-New Orleans Hornets’ temporary relocation to Oklahoma City after Hurricane Katrina and mentions of potential relocations, but little else. Then, in 2008, Oklahoma City surprisingly landed an NBA franchise when the Supersonics, a team with a storied history in the Emerald City, bolted for a smaller market with no existing fanbase. Feel-good story? Not exactly: the relocation itself reeked of greed, and the travesty of Seattle losing its franchise, which had already won an NBA title and competed year after year with legends like Michael Jordan, overshadowed OKC’s prime opportunity.
Jump-started by the emergence of former No. 2 overall pick Kevin Durant and general manager Sam Presti, the newly-created Thunder ascended to playoff contention just a couple years after landing in Oklahoma City. Inheriting a team that finished dead-last in the Western Conference in 2007-08, the Thunder improved to 23 wins in its inaugural season, then rocketed to 50 wins in 2009-10 and 55 in 2010-2011. A homegrown core featuring three future MVPs — Durant, guard Russell Westbrook and sixth man James Harden — supplanted the Lakers as the team to beat in the West and gave Oklahoma City’s burgeoning fanbase hope for an immediate title.
Instead, the wait lasted more than a decade, and that Thunder core was synonymous with the phrase “what-if” instead of the label “champion.” Oklahoma City finished either first or second in the Western Conference in three consecutive seasons from 2011-14, but only had one Finals appearance, a 2012 loss to the Miami Heat, to show for its efforts. The losses of Harden to the Houston Rockets and Durant to the Golden State Warriors spelled the end of a core with championship potential. And its successor, a two-man offensive dynamo featuring Westbrook and All-NBA regular Paul George, failed to advance past the first round of the playoffs and gave way to a full rebuild — and Oklahoma City’s first extended stretch of losing.
In the ensuing teardown, Presti found the diamonds in the rough that would deliver the first NBA championship in Oklahoma history and just the second title for the Seattle/OKC franchise.
The Thunder sent George to the Los Angeles Clippers for a package that included a bounty of draft picks and Gilgeous-Alexander, the future MVP and Finals MVP, then added to their stockpile by sending Westbrook to Houston. The moves decimated Oklahoma City’s chances of playoff contention, but the moves proved to be shrewd in the long-term. Presti delivered on the Thunder’s draft selections, notably selecting Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren to form a star trio with Gilgeous-Alexander and rounding out the rotation with talented role players like three-and-D specialist Lu Dort and 2023 top-ten pick Cason Wallace.
Oklahoma City found its footing, fast. In the 2020-21 season, the Thunder embarked on its new era with Gilgeous-Alexander as its leader on the court and first-time head coach Mark Daigneault at the helm… and won 22 of 82 games. From there, OKC improved to 24 wins, then took a major step with a 40-42 record in 2021-22. In each of those seasons, the Thunder finished in the bottom five of NBA attendance, and while the future was promising with Gilgeous-Alexander’s progression and the upcoming draft picks, contention in the immediate future was not a given.
After making a 16-win jump between 2020-21 and 2021-22, the Thunder improved by another 17 wins and took the top seed in the Western Conference with a 57-25 record. This regular season, OKC improved by another double-digit wins and posted one of the most dominant regular seasons in NBA history with a 68-14 record. Off the court, Oklahoma City jumped up to the top half of the league in total attendance and established one of the most significant home-court advantages in the NBA playoff bracket.
The Thunder entered the playoffs as favorites, but that does little to detract from its title run. Oklahoma City easily brushed aside the last-seeded Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves in its first and third playoff matchups, respectively, but seemingly lopsided series against the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference semifinals and Indiana Pacers in the NBA Finals lasted a full seven games and tested the character of the occasionally inconsistent Thunder to the limit. But in both series’ finales, the Thunder rose to the occasion and avoided catastrophic losses — ones that would flash back to OKC squads of years past.
Like the secret plans used to build the Death Star in the Star Wars prequels and Andor series, there are so many decisions and contributors, both major and minor, that go into crafting a championship-worthy NBA team and can get lost in the moment. Remember, future Hall of Famers like Durant (who, coincidentally, was traded from Phoenix to Houston earlier today), Westbrook, George, Harden, Chris Paul and head coach Billy Donovan came through Oklahoma City and never put it all together in the playoffs. They are parts of this championship team’s story, too. But two constants have been the Thunder front office and the Oklahoma sports community, which has supported and celebrated the Thunder in both the highs and lows since 2008.
Winning NBA games in Oklahoma City is not like winning NBA games in Los Angeles or Miami (the Thunder’s NBA Finals opponent, the Indiana Pacers, can also attest to that). The NBA institutes a salary cap for teams, but the playing field is not level financially and superstars gravitating toward big cities has been a major trend of the past two decades (LeBron James, for example). Without the free agency appeal of major cities, the franchise located in the United States’ 44th-biggest media market has had to rely on adept drafting (Durant, Harden, Westbrook, Williams, Holmgren) and bold trades (George, Caruso, Paul) to bring in its talent and compete with the big dogs. The same deficiencies have affected OKC’s ability to retain that superstar talent, with Durant departing in free agency to join the Golden State Warriors and Harden, Westbrook and George landing in the NBA’s biggest markets. NBA superstars don’t choose to join Oklahoma City, and they have foregone opportunities to stick around in favor of more glamorous cities.
Presti and the Thunder overcame all of those disadvantages to build a team capable of back-to-back no. 1 seeds in the Western Conference, and to prove that a team based in Oklahoma City, Okla. could win in all.
Which miracles did it take to make Sunday’s shining moments in Paycom Center a reality? First, an NBA franchise left its longtime city to take a chance on Oklahoma City as a long-term home (the book Boom Town by Sam Anderson is one of my favorite sports books of all-time and chronicles this saga, and the history of Oklahoma City in general). Second, that team had to gain enough traction with an undeveloped fan base to prove the experiment correct and become financially sustainable. Third, that team had to develop and retain superstar players in a league that favors bigger markets, all with a smaller margin for error. And fourth, that team had to win the 16 playoff games required to crown an NBA champion and overcome all the adversity that comes with that objective.
In accomplishing each of those four, the Thunder changed the narrative of its home, from an undeserving and unproven sports town that gained an NBA franchise from greed alone to a not-quite-good-enough small-market team synonymous with missed opportunities to, tonight, the center of the NBA universe, one that is definitively capable and proud to support an NBA championship.
The Thunder’s championship celebration is more than about one game, one Finals series, one playoff run or one season. It’s also more than about the 12 Thunder players that took the floor for Game 7. It’s about the city and its story, too. This run completed Oklahoma City’s journey and established both the city and its home state as viable, passionate, worthy of its professional sports opportunity and, at long last, championship-winning.
As a 68-win team and the owners of the best record in the NBA this season, the Thunder was the significant favorite to come away with its first title and accomplished exactly that. But its home base, Oklahoma City, was an underdog all the way.
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