Because the Thunder suddenly look beatable after a historic start

It seems like just yesterday that much of the NBA-discussing world was wondering whether the Oklahoma City Thunder were not just on the verge of shattering the league’s all-time record for wins in a single season, but whether the two-way dominance of the reigning NBA champions had become so all-consuming and so inescapable that even teams with title aspirations were simply betting on the chase.

It hear like just yesterday, but it wasn’t. It was a long, long time ago three weeks ago. The Before Time – the era when the most serious crisis in Oklahoma City was the loss of a second game, this to a newly returned alien.

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But a funny thing happened on the way to history: the Thunder lost a third. And a quarter. And a fifth. And a SIXTH – al Charlotte Hornetsamong all the teams, in what was, according to some, one of the most surprising results of the last decades.

Suddenly, a team that was on pace to surpass 73 wins was playing .500 ball for much of the month. And Wednesday came very close to falling south of that line, too: It needed a fourth-quarter comeback and some heroics from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just to hold off the Utah Jazz, owners of a 12-24 record and the NBA’s worst defense, at home.

Victories are victories and you don’t have to apologize for taking them where they come from. However, they are not all created equally – or even strictly avoided another The mistake did little to quell the concerns of those who have spent the last few weeks wondering how what once seemed like such a historic team could suddenly seem so humble.

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Thunder swingman Jalen Williams offered a fairly balanced take after the narrow escape:

“I think everything is a matter of perspective,” Williams said. “It may sound arrogant, but in the last three years we have won so much that when we have a normal human period where we lose a game or two that we shouldn’t have lost, the world goes crazy. […] For example, we are not superheroes. We have human moments. We tire physically and mentally throughout the season. And I feel like that kind of show was on display, right in that moment, and that’s something that we need to work on and that we can get better at.

It’s a dramatic shift in tone from “Will they win 75 games???” speeches that some of us have engaged in, but that man has some points. (And, to be honest: that’s not the case Him it was the one that put the 2025-26 Thunder next to the 2015-16 Warriors.)

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Since the start of the 2023-24 season, no one has more wins (156) or a higher winning percentage (.772) than Oklahoma City. When a team wins more than three-quarters of the time, there’s not exactly a lot of opportunity to get used to losing back-to-back games — which the Thunder have done twice in the last three weeks after doing twice all of last season — let alone experience an extended period of discomfort. When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression; when you’re used to a 60- or 70-win pace, .500 ball feels like a crisis.

Hangover from the NBA Cup?

The “physically and mentally tired” thing might have legs. On this week’s episode of The Big Number, Tom Haberstroh and I examined whether teams, like the Thunder, who make the NBA Cup semifinals experience a “hangover” in the weeks following their trip to Las Vegas…

…and while the sample size is still small, the number of games Vegas teams have played lately is not. Wednesday’s win over the Jazz marked Oklahoma City’s 12th game in 21 days since the tournament ended, a stretch that included four straight games. Nine NBA teams played a dozen games in that three-week span, including all four semifinalists (Knicks, Spurs, Thunder and Magic), with a combined record of 53-55 – a winning percentage of .491). By contrast, the 10 teams that played nine or 10 games in the same span had a mark of 55-44, a winning percentage of .556.

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Your mileage may vary based on how much you think a couple of miles of extra gaming in a couple of weeks adds up. It Could be you can see them, though, in the legs of your sweater, where a Thunder team that shot 38.1 percent of its 3-point shots during a 24-1 start, fifth-best in the NBA, dropped to 31.8 percent after an NBA Cup semifinal loss, fifth-bestworse in the league in that span.

It’s been a contagious cold snap for a Thunder offense that ranked fourth in offensive efficiency in 25 games and has since fallen to 18th, with rotation mainstays Cason Wallace, Luguentz Dort, Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe all shooting under 40% from the field over the past three weeks, and SGA, Wallace, Wiggins and Alex Caruso all under 30% from 3-point range.

Injury problems

Also hurting is the absence of starting center Isaiah Hartenstein, who has missed the last six games with a right calf strain. With him on the floor, the Thunder are getting offensive rebounds at a top-10 pace. With him on the sideline, they’re performing like the worst offensive rebounding team in the league — a particular shame when there are more misses to make up for than in the past. (OKC, dropping from a top-five defensive rebounding team through its 24-1 start to 16th in clearing the defensive boards during this break, didn’t help either.)

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Some of those mistakes are due to the right hand of Williams, who began his rise as Gilgeous-Alexander’s running mate two seasons ago and solidified himself as a cornerstone last season, earning All-Star, All-NBA and All-Defensive honors and authoring an iconic 40-point performance in the NBA Finals to help push the Thunder to the championship. After missing the first 19 games of the season to rehabilitate following offseason right wrist surgery, Williams struggled to regain his shooting touch.

Williams’ accuracy has declined everywhere except the free throw line this season – particularly from mid-range and beyond the arc – contributing to a true shooting percentage of .536, which would be the worst mark of his four-year NBA career. He’s also one of the worst high-volume offensive players in the league so far this season: Of the 53 players this season who have played at least 500 minutes and have a usage rate of 25% or higher, Williams’ TS% ranks 48th, ahead of only Brandon Miller, Jordan Poole, Russell Westbrook, Jeremiah Fears and Ja Morant.

It seems reasonable to give Williams some grace amid his shooting decline, considering that it hasn’t even been six weeks since Williams returned from surgery to repair an injury that literally forced him to relearn how to shoot the basketball, and that he’s trying to get back to top speed without the benefit of training camp or preseason. A player who uses so many assets inefficiently ago they impact your offense, though: the Thunder score like a league-average unit in J-Dub’s minutes, and at a league-worst rate in minutes he’s played without Gilgeous-Alexander.

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“It’s a competitive privilege”

Another place where the additional post-Cup workload could manifest itself? Execution in close quarters.

Heading into the semifinals against San Antonio, the Thunder were 9-1 in “clutch” games — defined by the NBA as contests in which the score was within five points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime — with a league-best 136.7 offensive rating and just three turnovers in a crucial 90 minutes. From? They are 2-3 with an offensive rating of 119, shooting just 20 of 55 (36.4%) from the field and 5 of 25 (20%) from 3-point range.

One of those defeats — a 108-105 loss at the hands of the Suns, better than anyone outside of Phoenix imagined they could be — came from Devin Booker, a veritable treasure of a game winner; Sometimes, a great offense beats even the best defense on the planet. That’s the point, though. For two months, the only way to defeat the Thunder seemed to be to “run them out of gas on the second night of a back-to-back on the road” or “have a giant anomaly and three star guards, and play perfectly.” Now it has become clear that there is more than one way to get them. Now, you know they bleed.

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[Get more Thunder news: Oklahoma City team feed]

“It’s a competitive privilege to be a team that other teams are capable of playing for,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said Monday, according to The Oklahoman’s Joe Mussatto. “And it forces you to achieve that. And if you can, you can actually become better and stronger as a result. And if you don’t, you learn the lesson. We have to learn the lessons in these.”

One of the lessons Williams learned from this unusual glitch in Oklahoma City’s efficient, nerve-wracking opponent-crushing machine? Life in the NBA isn’t always so peaceful.

“Every team has lost a couple of games this year that they wish they could make up,” he said Wednesday. “We understand it’s just like: How many of these can you limit during the season? And how much better can you get because of it?”

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The prospect of the Thunder improving — bringing Hartenstein (and big backup Jaylin Williams, who has missed the last 12 games with right heel bursitis) back into the fold, thawing out those frozen jumpers, doing a better job of finishing possessions — should be scary, considering they are still, even in this somewhat diminished form, good enough to beat anyone on any night. (Well, maybe not whoever.)

What three weeks of sobs have made clear, though, is that they are Not dominant enough to beat everyone ON Everything is fine night, regardless of who is in or out of the program. Especially when the price you pay for wearing the crown is taking each team’s best shot, without a breather in sight or a quarter allowed.

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“You can’t be at a playoff level every single night in the NBA,” Caruso recently told The Athletic’s Joel Lorenzi. “You’re going to get burned out. There’s no way for you to play like this for 82 games.”

Combine that with the vicissitudes of 3-point variance and the gods of injuries, and sometimes – even multiple times – even Goliath can be taken.