I think it was Tolstoy who wrote that all happy families are alike, and every new take laying into the modern NBA is different in its own way. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve seen Matthew Yglesias survey the landscape and fantasize about shrinking the league, Derek Thompson compare the regular season to a seven-month preseason, Nate Silver try to solve the NBA Draft and tanking with a 21-point plan, Bob Voulgaris declare the league irredeemably cooked, and a UBS analyst conclude that one of Nike’s chief headwinds is the waning cultural influence of basketball. Mark Cuban, on the other hand, would like to note that the TV contracts have all been signed and everyone involved with the NBA is still making a whole bunch of money.
It’s been a whole year of this. And of course, I wrote my own article on the league’s malaise—read that one! I also wrote an article about the age limit that’s directly on point with what that UBS analyst identified. But now that we’ve made it to the NBA Playoffs, I need a break. Instead, after a mediocre year for basketball fans (and a great year for NBA takedowns), I think it’s time for everyone to focus on a more concrete problem: the Oklahoma City Thunder.
They must be stopped.
They can be stopped.
And my god, a league that needs some positive momentum could really use a Thunder upset over the next few months.
Many readers are probably familiar with the context here, but for anyone who isn’t: The defending champion Thunder slowed down after opening the year 24-1, but remain the most dominant team in the NBA when everyone’s healthy. Isaiah Hartenstein, in particular, is a huge factor for them. The Thunder are 88-16 with Hartenstein playing over the past two years, and he’s healthy again after missing an extended portion of the year (an absence that coincided with OKC’s regression from a 2017 Warriors regular season pace). Meanwhile, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the presumptive back-to-back MVP winner and the most reliable crunch time scorer on the planet. Mark Daigneault’s not known as one of the best coaches alive, but he probably should be. Sam Presti is the greatest general manager of this generation. The defense has been the best in the league for two years straight. And all of that is why they are the clear favorite to win the championship (+110), which would make them the first team to win back-to-back titles since the Warriors did it in 2018.
Let me be clear, though: the problem with the Thunder is not that they are too good, but that nothing about what makes them good is interesting. They are boring as villains and unconvincing as heroes. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will dominate from the midrange like the superstar guards we grew up with, but what seems like it should be a modern-day Jordan experience is more often a series of rote and emotionless pull-ups from the elbow that are closer to prime LaMarcus Aldridge. He’s frequently criticized for foul-baiting—making unnatural basketball moves to initiate contact, exaggerating that contact, inevitably being rewarded for it—but I would submit that if we’re all being 100 percent honest about Shai, foul-baiting is the only thing he does that makes basketball fans feel anything at all.
Beyond Shai, everyone else on the team rigorously takes the right, analytics-friendly shots (layups and threes), and in general, OKC has been optimized for the modern era in every conceivable way. The Thunder defense is ultra-aggressive and handsy on the perimeter, an area that refs don’t call tightly, but extremely disciplined about not fouling on drives, where refs pay much closer attention. That formula works. OKC games are dominated by defense that generates turnovers and tons of transition threes, and often over by halftime. At a macro level, the team has been built with the current CBA in mind. Years of Presti stockpiling draft picks and carefully managing the cap sheet have left OKC deeper than any of its peers, and much better positioned to weather the modern cap environment and the increasingly onerous conditions it imposes on great teams.
All of that is impressive, of course. But there’s no personality here, and not much mystique. OKC’s success is less a story of legendary talent than of legendary discipline and management. If I were being extra cynical, I’d say that Shai is working the rulebook in one direction, the defense is working it in another, while Presti sits atop the pyramid in the CBA catbird seat. Good for all of them and their optimal approaches. If you’ve ever wanted to root for Salesforce: The Basketball Team, I have great news.
As for the rest of us, I hope we can do better than spending the next few years marveling at ball pressure and the art of drawing fouls and what a team-friendly contract Ajay Mitchell has.
Imagine a Jokic title run. He won in 2023 without playing a single great team, and while that was a crowning achievement for one of the 15 best basketball players of all time, the breakthrough ultimately felt more perfunctory than triumphant. The most legendary players in history win hearts and minds when they survive tests from other great players and great teams, and it felt like we got shortchanged three years ago. This year, though? Jokic would have to go through Anthony Edwards and the Wolves in the first round, a 60-win Spurs team in round two, the OKC juggernaut in the Western Conference Finals, and probably either the Celtics or Pistons in the Finals. If he does that, there will be no question about who was the greatest player of this generation, and coupled with a body of work that’s frankly mind-blowing (he came so close to stealing a gold from Steph, KD and LeBron at the Paris Olympics), a title probably vaults Jokic into the top 10 players of all time.
Or Victor Wembanyama. While SGA will probably win MVP because modern awards voters tend to gravitate toward the picks that are hardest to criticize and easiest to defend with stats, Wemby is actually the correct answer this season. He’s the best defensive player the league has seen in 60 years, he commands so much attention on offense that he made Harrison Barnes look like a capable starter and Keldon Johnson the Sixth Man of the Year, and he’s gotten 10% more dominant with each passing month. A season in San Antonio that began with the Spurs projected to win about 45 games — and a prediction that they would lose in the first round — will end with 62 wins and Wemby increasingly looking like the best player alive. He is a star in the way that Steph Curry is a star: you hear about him, you get excited to watch, and then when the games start, the experience often exceeds even the craziest expectations. That’s what the whole year has been like in San Antonio, and if it ends with a title and Wemby establishing himself as the best young star the NBA’s had since LeBron, with far more early success than even LeBron had, that’s a fantastic outcome for the league as a whole.
The Celtics, meanwhile, have a decent shot at winning their second title in three years. Now, I won’t lie here and tell you that Boston would be as satisfying as the last two options. Many good people despise this organization and its fans. Also, there is no historically great player on par with Wemby and Jokic (or even Shai), and the Celtics win in a lot of the same ways that OKC does—defense, discipline, tons of threes, lots of interchangeable parts. There’s more charm to this story, though. I’m thinking of Joe Mazzula’s deadpan and psychotic press conferences, Jaylen Brown’s early-season heroics, Jayson Tatum’s inhuman return 10 months after an Achilles injury last May, and a cast of cult hero role players (Hugo Gonzalez, Payton Pritchard, Neemias Queta) that everyone can love (I need to know a lot more about the Settlers of Catan leaderboard if they take this all the way to the Finals). Big picture: If the Celtics break through and win a title less than a year after Tatum’s injury seemed to signal the end of an era in Boston, it will be one of the craziest stories of my life watching basketball.
I’ll also nominate the Pistons (dark horse) and Wolves (much darker horse) as fringe contenders who could crash the party. Almost no one in basketball media thinks the Pistons can beat even the Celtics, let alone the Thunder or Spurs, but if Cade Cunningham and the Pistons can win a title two years after finishing the season 14-68, then that, too, would be one of the craziest basketball stories of my lifetime. The Wolves, on the other hand, probably don’t have it this year, but on the off chance that Anthony Edwards can get healthy and slay Jokic, Wemby, and Shai on the way to a title, that mints him as the biggest star of the new generation—and a 10 times more magnetic counterpoint to what the NBA’s had with Shai over the past few years.
Finally, I feel obligated to at least mention the Knicks, a team I do not believe in at all that could nevertheless run the table and shock the world (or at least me). The key point, of course, is that ANY of these outcomes would be refreshing for basketball fans everywhere and fantastic news for the league itself. And speaking of good news: the Thunder are not invincible.
They nearly lost in the second round to Jokic and a skeleton crew of a Nuggets team last year. They needed a huge game 4 from Jalen Williams to go up 3-1 against the Wolves in the Western Conference Finals and remove any drama from that series. They went to the wire with a Pacers team that should have been woefully overmatched in the Finals last June. Blowouts aside, their close games got interesting. Role players turned to pumpkins and the offense looked one-dimensional, and all that happened with a much healthier roster.
This year, they are 1-4 in matchups against Wemby and the Spurs, Hartenstein played only 47 games, while Williams has battled hamstring and wrist injuries and has never once looked like the All-NBA sidekick that he was, and that OKC needed, for much of last June’s title run. Again: they remain clear favorites, but if they’re going to do it again, they’ll need better health than they’ve had all year, and, absent a suddenly revitalized Jalen Williams, they may need SGA to carry them to an even greater, more heliocentric extent than he already has.
Let’s hope none of that happens. Because here’s one aspect of the “fix the NBA” conversations that rarely gets mentioned: most of the league’s current problems are not really new. More pronounced this decade? Definitely. Compounded by blowouts, injuries and gameplay issues that are new? Sure. Absolutely. But the NBA has never been a well-oiled machine that kept everyone happy. The league is like Twitter, a platform that people have complained about every year since 2010, with a steady drumbeat of “Twitter isn’t what it used to be.” In fact, Twitter has always been full of people complaining about Twitter. Likewise for the past 40 years of professional basketball.
What has traditionally made basketball work are great teams and magnetic stars that transcend all that noise and captivate millions of people anyway. And alongside a charmless, borg-like juggernaut that doubles as a wonderful foil for would-be playoff heroes, the league has plenty of good candidates to win over America in the next few months. Whether it’s Jokic staking his claim to all-timer status, Wemby announcing his arrival as the best player since Jordan, or the Celtics not tanking after Tatum’s injury, rising from the ashes, and storming through the playoffs to cement their legacy as the best team of the decade, there are a variety of timelines that could cut through a year of angst to remind fans that the NBA can still be fantastic. That’s my prevailing thought, and hope, on the way into the next two months of playoff basketball.
In all sincerity, OKC is the gold standard right now, and an objectively incredible success story that will provide a phenomenal test to anyone they play. Teams this good are what make the playoffs special in the first place. Now please, someone go out there and beat them.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.