Ridiculous Opinions #290
In praise of The Oklahoma City Thunder…
I’ve pretty much been watching basketball all my life. The origins of this are strange. Way back when I was a kid, our weird cable operator had odd channels. I have documented the fact that my small Oklahoma town was one of the first places to have MTV (because MTV couldn’t break into the larger cable markets, they ended up using a strategy of going to small cable markets and worming their way in there). The fact that MTV existed in Tahlequah, Oklahoma changed my world.
But our cable system had other, odd channels as well. We had Ted Turner’s channel, which I think was called TBS and broadcasted out of Atlanta. It played The Brady Bunch at 3:30 every day and The Flintsones at 4:00 every day, requisite viewing for me as a child (which was followed by G.I. Joe at 4:30 PM, but that was on a different channel). I watched these shows like clockwork.
We also had WGN, which was a Chicago-based station. WGN never really had anything I liked on it and the WORST part about WGN was the fact that they broadcast all nine billion games from the Chicago Cubs every season, and because back in the day, Wrigley Field had no lights, they were always on during the day. Ugh. WGN was channel 9 on our cable and I always knew to avoid Channel 9 because there was never anything on.
Except the Chicago Bulls.
I started watching the Bulls sometime when I was in middle school, when they played a young player by the name of Michael Jordan. These were local broadcasts, so there was nothing too exciting about them aside from MJ. But man, did I like to watch Jordan. I watched all those years when they would play the bad boy Detroit Pistons or the ever-hated Lakers or those pesky Utah Jazz. I was there for a lot of those games, and it was even better for me when Jordan became the true face of the league, because this team that I had followed was now everywhere.
I was there all through the 90s, from Jordan’s bizarre retirement to the 72-win season, to the endless championships. Basically, the Bulls were like a hometown team for me (although when I moved to Arizona, I watched the Suns as well).
But then I moved out of the United States in the mid-90s and basketball fell away. Living in China meant that my ability to watch basketball was next to impossible and I missed the early-Lebron years and the Kobe/Shaq years and the Allen Iverson years. It was like a strange void in my existence, made all the more shocking when, around 2010, I found out that Oklahoma City had a team. I didn’t know this. I had lived in West Africa and took a second trip to China in that time, so I had no idea as to the workings of the NBA. To this day, I still don’t have a very good idea as to what happened. And to think that Oklahoma City took the Seattle Supersonics from their city was unheard of!
Because of all this intrigue, I began to pay attention to the team. Shockingly, they were pretty good! In this instance, I would highly recommend to book Boomtown by Sam Anderson for a small history of both Oklahoma City and its strange correlation with the rise of the Thunder. This is one of the most surprisingly engaging books I’ve ever read.
Anyway, all of this culminates in one of the worst summers of my life when we left Bangladesh. I spent that spring locked down in Gulshan because of the threats of terrorism. During that time, I would watch the Thunder make their way through the playoffs and eventually lose in heartbreaking fashion to Golden State. I was absolutely devastated. That year I was hoping for a Thunder/Raptors final, but it wasn’t meant to be.
And after we had went to Canada for the summer, the terrorist attack that we feared would happen actually happened and it was awful. People we knew lost their lives and I walked around shell-shocked for a long while after that.
I think it was three days after that attack that Kevin Durant left the Thunder to go play for Golden State. The movement of basketball players from team-to-team is pretty commonplace, but Durant was THE foundational element of the Thunder. As if life wasn’t shitty enough, to have your favorite team get decimated by its best player leaving for a team THAT THEY LOST TO was just heartbreaking. I am fully-aware how dumb that is to type, but it should be obvious to you that some people (including myself) have WAY too much emotional investment in teams that are populated and owned by pampered millionaires/billionaires, but that’s just the way life is. I was a fan of the Thunder and I was wounded when Durant left.
That next year was spent in Canada, about three hours north of Toronto. Contrary to what EVERYONE thought would happen, the Thunder were NOT devastated by the loss of Kevin Durant. Russell Westbrook, who everyone thought would be on the first train out of the state when Durant left, decided to stay. And the general manager of the team managed to cobble together a ragtag group of players to surround him, all of whom were scrappy and hard-working. And lo and behold, Westbrook pulled off a season that was for the record books.
He averaged a triple-double and ended up winning MVP that year. I watched every single game they played and it was a bit of a lifeline that helped me recover from the devastating events that took place in Bangladesh and the generally crap year I spent teaching in Canada.
There was something wonderful about witnessing all of that. Westbrook is a tough player to be a fan of, because he makes all kinds of mistakes and is generally wild and somewhat out of control on the court. But he was a hero to many in Oklahoma because he decided to stay. That loyalty meant something to a team that had a hard time attracting players and a state that very much knew that nobody wanted to live there. It was a bit of a bright spot.
But the inevitable would soon arrive. After several years of players coming and going and many first-round exits from the playoffs, the Thunder had to blow it up and start fresh. There was a fun season during the Covid-year, when OKC was doing well, but after that, they decided to tank and try to rebuild. They had two interesting players and not much else. Those players?
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort. Both Canadians.
A coincidence? Sometimes the universe tells you things. Whether you are in tune enough to understand those things is one thing, but the fact that OKC’s two best players were from Canada is a strange little irony for me.
The next two years were bleak. SGA was a promising young player who was highly skilled on the court, but he was playing for an absolutely terrible team in OKC. Lu Dort was widely considered a defensive monster, but when you’re the only one on the team that can do what he does, it really doesn’t matter. OKC was bad.
OKC had acquired SGA from the Los Angeles Clippers in a trade for Paul George and a raft of draft picks. Everyone thought it was nice to get those draft picks and didn’t much think of SGA, other than he was a decent player and had potential. Basically, OKC sold off their assets at that point and decided to lean into what is referred to as the TANK. That’s when a sports team intentionally fails in order to get good draft picks for rebuilding a team.
Following that, we had two years of wandering in the wilderness, with players like Poku (Aleksej Pokuševski), who was a seven-foot giant with no discernible skills other than a great nickname and some absolutely bonkers (not in a good way) plays on the court. People referred to OKC as the black eye of the league for tanking, but there were reasons for the tank.
The first reason for the tank was the simple fact that no one wants to play for a losing team. When a team pretty much announces that they’re going to be losing for a while in the hopes of rebuilding even stronger, a lot of NBA players aren’t going to be chomping at the bit to join them. So, OKC suffered some dreadful losses with a ton of no-name players (including a record-setting 70 point loss to the Memphis Grizzlies) and things looked pretty bleak. Our only hope during that time was draft lottery luck, so that our team would be lucky enough to get the first pick in the draft. This did not happen and the team, which had one of the worst records in the league, got the seventh pick. Not a great look.
But the other reason, and really the most important, is that no one wants to play in Oklahoma City. If you’ve got a bunch of spoiled millionaires and you give them a choice between playing in Los Angeles or Miami or New York, or playing in Oklahoma City, who do you think they’re going to choose? This is completely understandable, but it’s what contributes to the inability of small markets to have good teams. Milwaukee isn’t a top destination. Memphis isn’t a top destination. Portland isn’t a top destination.
So, what do you do when you want to build a team and no one wants to go there? You start building from the ground up. That’s exactly what Oklahoma City did.
There’s more to this story and I’ll give it to you next week…
