It would be easy to look around and suggest that a team like the Suns, the Lakers or even the Warriors improved their rosters enough this offseason to where they could feasibly come out of the West this coming year.
But for all the attention we pay to the high-end moves and contending teams, far less is paid to the small-market, up-and-coming clubs, which in many cases rely more on internal development.
Hence why you haven’t heard as much about the Thunder, which, fresh off winning 40 games as the NBA’s second-youngest club, are bringing back the entirety of coach Mark Daigneault’s core. And that includes last year’s No. 2 pick, Chet Holmgren, who failed to log a single minute in his first NBA season after sustaining a Lisfranc injury in his foot this time last year.
Yet there are high hopes for both Holmgren and the Thunder as they prepare to take the court. Few expected them to be in the running for a play-in spot last season, but the team did so many things right, even without Holmgren. OKC forced more turnovers (1,375) last season than any other defense in the league. By contrast, it rarely gave the ball away—perhaps a benefit of the Thunder having three solid ballhandlers (including Jalen Williams and Josh Giddey) is continuity—even as Thunder players missed an NBA-high 323 games last season to injury, per Spotrac.
But make no mistake: No. 1 option Shai Gilgeous-Alexander stirred the drink for OKC, which squeezed an average of 31.4 points and 5.5 assists out of the All-NBA guard on 51% shooting.
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This isn’t to say the Thunder are perfect. They were merely a middle-of-the-road defensive club last season, and while the rim-protecting Holmgren can be a difference-maker from that point, it’s abundantly rare—Walker Kessler being the exception—that rookies add value on defense. On that same wavelength, OKC was also quite poor at closing out opponents’ possessions with a defensive rebound, leaving the Thunder 28th out of the 30 NBA teams in the category.
One thing that wouldn’t be surprising to hear the Thunder push for is more players to step up their aggressiveness as it relates to getting to the free throw line. Gilgeous-Alexander more than did his part there, hitting a league-high 669 of them, or almost 10 per contest. No other player on the roster beyond Gilgeous-Alexander averaged more than Lu Dort’s 3.5 tries per game.
The beauty in what OKC is facing, though, is the fact that the young club holds so many future draft assets to where it could easily accelerate its process—and add more longstanding veterans—to win a bit more, sooner, if it chooses to do so. The Thunder, which lacked a single player over the age of 30 once Mike Muscala got dealt at the deadline, could opt to spend their capital to go all in on a star player or two.
It isn’t necessarily something to consider too heavily now. But if any team would trade for a star as opposed to signing one through free agency, it’d be a small-market one like Sam Presti’s Thunder. The club—rebuilt after parting ways with future Hall of Famers James Harden, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook—strategically burrowed away acorn after acorn in hopes of someday harvesting the sort of winning culture we’ve seen in San Antonio and Golden State for the better part of the past two decades. Whether Presti can ever build something equivalent with this group remains to be seen. But if we’re going to see it happen, it seems likely that a leap could be on the way for this young, talented group this season.
