On the leaderboard of all-time N.B.A. finals appearances — Lakers (32), Celtics (23), Warriors (12) — you will have to scan very far down to find the Oklahoma City Thunder. This week, when the Thunder face the Indiana Pacers for the championship, it will be the team’s second trip. That might not sound impressive — until you consider that the franchise has existed for only 17 years. (The Celtics have been around since 1946.) The Thunder was born, chaotically, in 2008, and since then the team has operated at a level of success that puts many older organizations to shame.
In its eyeblink of an existence, OKC has made five conference finals and produced three league M.V.P.s. Since 2009, it has won more regular-season games than any team except the Celtics. Thunder players, past and present, have driven a disproportionate amount of the league’s recent drama. In a sport where relevance is hard to sustain, OKC seems overdue for a down period — underachieving stars, iffy chemistry, a slow slide into mediocrity.
Instead, somehow, the Thunder are better than they have ever been. This season, the team won a shocking 68 games, tied for the fifth-most in N.B.A. history, and smashed the record for a stat called point differential — basically, a measure of how badly you steamroll everything in your path. (OKC outscored opponents by an average of 12.9 points per game, breaking the 1972 Lakers’ average of 12.3.) This Thunder team is young, feisty, wild, precise, mean, giddy and overloaded with talent. It enters the finals as heavy favorites to win its first championship.
No team, however, reaches the peak of basketball glory without at least one near-death experience.
OKC’s came a few weeks ago, against the Denver Nuggets, in Game 7 of the second round of the playoffs. The series was an instant classic. The fact that the Thunder survived, and the way they did so, is a perfect illustration of what makes the team so special.
For OKC, the first round of the playoffs went exactly according to plan: They annihilated the Memphis Grizzlies, winning the opening game by 51. But that joy didn’t last for long. Because in the second round, the Thunder ran into a serious problem — one of the biggest problems in the history of basketball.
The problem’s name was Nikola Jokic. Jokic is a giant Serbian, nearly seven feet tall and 300 pounds. Basically everyone agrees that he is the best player on earth. He can pass like Magic Johnson and shoot like Larry Bird, and he has won the league’s M.V.P. award three of the last five years. Jokic moves with the lumbering grace of a dancing bear, and he dominates games with a weird combination of force and delicacy. He’s like a car accident that can play the flute.
For two weeks, across six excruciating games, Jokic had been torturing the citizens of OKC: tipping in missed shots, spinning to hit impossible three-pointers, converting losses into wins. Game by game, he seemed to be finding new solutions to the Thunder’s perplexing defense. Denver and OKC split the first six games. The whole season came down to one night.
An hour before tipoff, when Jokic jogged onto the court to warm up, the crowd booed. Then it chanted “OKC,” louder and louder, as if it were a magic incantation that might defeat him — might make him burst into flames or shrink to half his size.
Jokic was unfazed. As soon as the game started, he was a hub of total destruction. He scored, and he set up his teammates to score, and he kept baiting OKC defenders into fouls. The Thunder, meanwhile, couldn’t make a shot. In my notebook, I kept writing the word “OOF.” Everything felt wrong. Jokic was wrecking the Thunder’s season with a perfectly neutral expression on his face — he looked bored, the way gods are bored. As he ambled back up to the free-throw line, with Denver already leading by 10, I scribbled in my notebook: “I think Jokic might win this game by himself, just by being a genius.”
But then I wrote two more words, with no idea of their significance at the time: “Caruso in.”
Alex Caruso had checked in for the Thunder. This was not, on its face, earth-shattering news. Caruso is a defensive specialist with a shiny bald head who, after four years of college, went undrafted by all 30 N.B.A. teams. Somehow, through grit and hustle, he clawed his way to an admirable career. The Thunder traded for him last summer. And now, halfway through this disastrous first quarter, in the most important game of his life, Caruso was given an impossible assignment: to guard Nikola Jokic.
Caruso is tough and wiry. But he is six inches shorter than Jokic and nearly 100 pounds lighter. His bright blue headband didn’t quite reach the bottom of Jokic’s chin. Side by side, they looked like an old-timey comedy duo, or like a ventriloquist and his dummy. How was this supposed to work?
Caruso’s mission, it looked like, was to stop Jokic from ever touching a basketball again for the rest of his natural life. He embraced the plan with holy zeal. Whenever Jokic managed to work himself into a good position, whenever one of his teammates glanced his way, Caruso would launch himself between them like a Secret Service agent taking a bullet. Then the wrestling match would start. Jokic would shift his massive weight, and Caruso would stagger and flail, and sometimes he would wrap his arms around Jokic’s waist — at which point Jokic would shift again, sending Caruso lurching, and he would plant his feet and lunge, windmilling his arms, burying his chest in Jokic’s stomach. You know how they say that, when you’re caught in an avalanche, you’re supposed to start swimming? It looked like Caruso was doing that. He was gasping for air, struggling and tumbling in the avalanche of Jokic.
The whole thing was mesmerizing.
When Caruso started harassing Jokic, the Thunder were losing 21-10. Over the next five minutes, Jokic hardly touched the ball. He did not score or register an assist. And Caruso’s stubbornness disrupted the whole Nuggets offense. On every possession, Jokic’s teammates were forced to waste precious seconds watching the skirmish, waiting for Caruso to just relax, to stop doing parkour all over the vast landscape of their superstar’s body. After a while, they gave up. They started taking bad shots, throwing panicked passes. This allowed OKC’s defenders to do the one thing they do best: to pluck the ball out of the air and run as if they are hitting turbo arrows in Mario Kart, throwing down alley-oops, raining open threes, sending the crowd into ecstatic frenzied chants of “OKC.”
In other words, Alex Caruso — through sheer unreasonable cussedness — had saved the Thunder’s season. By the end of that first quarter, Denver’s lead had shrunk to five, and a minute later OKC shot ahead. They never trailed again. Wherever Jokic went, Caruso chased him — and all around that duo, the Thunder defenders swarmed and pounced, stealing the ball, running away, dunking. OKC’s lead grew and grew. By the third quarter, the game was out of hand. The crowd noise was hurting my ears.
The exclamation point came early in the fourth, when Caruso snatched the ball from Jokic’s hands, raced down the floor and dropped a backward pass to a sprinting teammate for a dunk. OKC led by 32. Denver called timeout and emptied its bench. In the biggest game of the season, after the poorest possible start, in less than 20 minutes of actual game time, the Thunder had just outscored the Nuggets by 43 points. When Denver surrendered, pulling Jokic and all its starters, there were still more than nine minutes left on the game clock.
Normal N.B.A. teams tend to lean heavily on a handful of players. The hall-of-fame coach Pat Riley has a mantra: “Play six and trust five.” OKC regularly plays 11. Despite featuring Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the league’s reigning M.V.P., the Thunder is as egalitarian as a pro basketball team could ever hope to be. In the first quarter of the first game of this year’s playoffs, OKC found minutes for 10 different players. By the end of the game, they had played 13 — and also destroyed the spirit of the Memphis Grizzlies. Multiple Thunder bench players would probably start for other teams.
“I was watching practice today,” Aaron Wiggins told me. “And I’m like: Dog, we got 12 guys over here right now who could GO. Right now. Every team I’ve ever been on, it might go eight deep. Some less. But we have 12 to 15 starters. It doesn’t make sense.” Wiggins usually comes off the bench; in one of his rare starts this year, he scored 41 points.
As a result of OKC’s depth, the team comes at you in waves: body after body, steal after steal, shot after shot. They have a whole scrambling army of long-armed, interchangeable, complementary players. This is what enables the Thunder’s signature basketball weapon: the swarm. That’s the word people most often reach for to describe OKC’s defense — a relentless, dominating, full-scale attack. No matter what kind of game in which the team finds itself — slow, fast, pretty, ugly, cursed, charmed — OKC always seems to be about two or three swarming minutes away from blowing the other team out. On defense, its players merge into a roving five-man hive mind, coordinated but chaotic. If an opponent starts dribbling, a Thunder defender will be all over him (“chesting,” they call it) while, almost at random, other defenders come flying at him from behind, or from the side, jump-scaring him until he surrenders the ball. Spots on the floor that are supposed to be safe are no longer safe. It can actually be terrifying to watch — like a nature documentary when the wolves show up.
I asked Wiggins what it felt like to be part of that swarm. “Dog,” he said, and he smiled. “Like, monstrous.”
“It feels powerful,” Caruso told me. We were speaking the day after his heroic Game 7 defense on Jokic. He had a big cut on his lip, just barely healed over — “from wrestling with the big fella,” he said. He told me he was still exhausted. He was about to go get a massage, sit in the cold tub and take a serious nap.
When I asked Caruso to explain the Thunder’s defense, he said it wasn’t all that complicated. Plenty of teams run similar schemes. The coaches set clear guidelines, then let the defenders improvise. What makes OKC special, he said, is something elemental — and at this point Caruso smiled, in a way that made me see, instantly, what he must have been like as a little kid.
“We just have a bunch of guys that want to take the ball from you,” he said. In fact, Caruso said, when the swarm is really swarming, it doesn’t even feel like defense — it feels like a particularly mean form of offense. “We don’t feel like we’re trying to stop you from scoring,” he said. “We feel like we’re influencing you to give us the ball.”
How did the Thunder get so good? What is their secret? The simplest answer, although he will not like it, is Sam Presti. Presti is the team’s general manager, a front-office prodigy who got the job when he was only 29, right before the Seattle SuperSonics were transplanted, scandalously, to OKC. (See? Drama!) He is serious, rational, rigorously organized and decisive. Also, in true Thunder style, he prefers to deflect all individual praise toward the larger group.
But it’s hard to deflect praise when you’ve done what Presti has just done. Especially when you’ve done it twice. In a tiny market, in the middle of nowhere, in a league tilted toward the coasts, in almost no time at all, he has now built two great teams. The first (circa 2009) featured one of the most powerful trios in N.B.A. history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden — all of whom Presti picked in consecutive drafts. It was an outrageous hot streak, and the team ascended very fast, making it all the way to the 2012 finals. Unfortunately, they lost, and what looked like it was going to be a sure dynasty rattled apart, year by year. There were contract disputes, injuries, personality conflicts, near-misses. That team never reached the finals again. After a few seasons of diminishing returns, Presti stripped the roster down to its foundations and started again. It seemed as if OKC’s basketball glory days were over.
Except now, 13 years later, here we are. Presti has caught lightning in a bottle in back-to-back storms. He has nailed his recent draft picks — Chet Holmgren at No. 2, Jalen Williams at No. 12, Cason Wallace at No. 10 — and pulled off trades so imbalanced they’ve become N.B.A. memes. (The list of assets Presti extracted from the Clippers in 2019, in exchange for Paul George, looks like a CVS receipt.) And OKC’s current finals team actually appears to be better than the one that made it back in 2012. It is less top-heavy, less vulnerable to the fickle personalities of superstars. The pieces fit seamlessly. On top of which, Presti’s arsenal is still loaded with draft picks and contracts to help pull off future deals. The Thunder, basically, are set up for success as well as any team ever has been. As an executive, Presti seems to have entered his prime. Even the players recognize his aura.
“Probably a genius,” Jalen Williams said. “The guru.”
“He’s a star G.M.,” Chet Holmgren told me. “Like, if 30 G.M.s walk into the gym to watch you play, you recognize him. You don’t know who the other [expletive] G.M.s are.”
OKC’s head coach, Mark Daigneault, seems to have been created in a lab to oversee Presti’s team. He is 40 — young by coaching standards — and speaks fluently in Thunderisms. The whole organization, Daigneault told me, is thoroughly egalitarian. He doesn’t work for Sam Presti — he works with him. Similarly, the players don’t work for the coaches — they work with them. The whole institution (trainers, chefs, P.R., security) is a collection of peers working toward a single goal. “I call it leading from the middle,” Daigneault said. “We’re spokes on a wheel.”
“But you’ve got to have the right guys,” he added. “We have the right guys.”
Many of those guys arrived during Daigneault’s first two seasons, when the Thunder was terrible by design. (“I got hired, and then the team was completely deconstructed,” he told me.) In back to back years, largely overshadowed by the Covid pandemic, OKC went 22-50 and 24-58.
Below the surface, however, things were percolating. Even when they were losing — maybe especially then — Presti was careful about the personalities he brought in. He was looking for a certain kind of player: hungry, altruistic, obsessed with process over results. Many of them turned out to be underdogs — players who, for one reason or another, had been passed over by other teams. Wiggins was taken with the No. 55 pick, near the end of the draft, a spot that almost never yields a useful N.B.A. player. Lu Dort, the soul of the Thunder’s defense, was undrafted. Isaiah Joe, the most combustible three-point shooter on the team, had been cut by the Philadelphia 76ers. OKC gathered them in, along with others like them, and gave them real minutes, helping to develop them into serious N.B.A. players. They were all equal members of the collective. It was like building a superteam out of the last kids picked in gym class.
“They are all kind of speaking the same language,” Daigneault told me. “They’re from the same tribe, mentally. The odds of those guys making it are low. The odds of them being rotation players are lower. To have this many on this good of a team is crazy.” Because of that psychological profile, Daigneault said, the hard times weren’t all that hard. “We were losing, but it wasn’t morose. We were making progress. There was a vision.”
Presti doesn’t talk a lot to the media, but the environment he has built speaks volumes. I first wrote about the Thunder in 2012, after the team’s first run to the finals. (I got so obsessed I wrote a book about it.) The first thing that struck me, when I walked into the practice facility, was the symmetry of the basketballs. The courts were surrounded by racks, and every single rack was full, and every ball on every rack sat label out, perfectly straight. The straightness of the balls became my favorite shorthand for the way Presti ran his organization — the meticulous attention to detail. Once, I saw Presti straightening the balls himself.
Thirteen years later, the practice facility looks exactly the same. Same lights, same courts, same chairs. And I can confirm that the balls are still perfectly straight.
“You want to know what was explained to me on Day 1?” Holmgren told me, sitting in the same chair in which I once interviewed Kevin Durant. “Everything in here is in order. You come in, you never see the grass long. The bushes aren’t overgrown. The fridge is always full. The waters are always label out.”
But does it really make a difference? I asked.
“Big picture — maybe, maybe not,” Holmgren said. “But it sets the tone. There’s a certain way things are done. If we can’t come in here and know what to expect from the environment, how can we be consistent ourselves? That’s a Presti thing.”
The attention to detail, Daigneault believes, carries over into games. “A game is 100 possessions or so on offense, 100 possessions or so on defense,” he told me. “And there’s all these little parts of each possession. The cumulative effect of all those little moments, all those little fundamentals, in all those little possessions, is what leads to a win or a loss. Having your arms out instead of standing with your arms to your side — if you do that on one possession, it’s probably not very impactful. It won’t win or lose you a game. But if you do it on most possessions, it could have a huge impact. And so we’re getting the team to look at the game like that, in a place where the environment is built on that mind-set.”
OKC’s 2025 team seems like the ultimate product of Presti’s methods. They are the human embodiment of the straightness of the balls. It’s like a fable. Finally, after all these years of trying, the balls were straightened so precisely that not a single molecule was off — and at that moment, a mystical glittering light started swirling through the gym, transforming the balls, one by one, into selfless basketball players with above-average wingspans who would — relentlessly, collectively, with one coordinated mind — swarm their way to victory.
We have no idea, obviously, what will happen in the finals. It’s possible that the Thunder will lose. The Indiana Pacers, another joyfully egalitarian team that has been warping reality around them all postseason, could pull off one of the great finals upsets in history. Maybe, as with 2012, this Thunder team will never make it back. Maybe the world will explode tomorrow. But none of that is really the point. Things have been set up about as well as they possibly could have been. The balls have been straightened. And no matter what happens next, the balls will still be straight.
Sam Anderson is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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