The Thunder can’t be duplicated, but opposing teams would be foolish not to emulate NBA champs

The Oklahoma City Thunder are a miracle. They acquired their best player, the league MVP, in one of the best trades of all time, a blockbuster that also brought back five first-round picks and two pick swaps. They used one of those picks to select an All-Star wing who scored 40 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. After 11 years of winning 44 to 60 games, they endured only two bad seasons, then ascended to even greater heights than they did the last time they went into rebuild mode.

That time, the franchise selected future MVPs in three consecutive drafts. But this iteration of the Thunder might be even more difficult to duplicate. Their three stars complement one another beautifully and are all between the ages of 23 and 26. Their six All-Defense-caliber players span the positional spectrum. Nobody’s older than 31, and nobody cost the front office a big bundle of draft capital to acquire. While other teams weigh whether or not it’s worth giving up future picks to chase a championship, the team that won Game 7 of the NBA Finals on Sunday is sitting on a massive surplus of them. There is no precedent for this.

If opposing general managers believe they can copy Oklahoma City’s championship formula, they’re fooling themselves. It would be equally foolish, however, to think that there’s nothing to learn from the Thunder. The 2025 champs are talented enough to have competed in any era, but they crossed the finish line this year because they were built to overcome obstacles specific to today’s game.

On a podcast last month, Philadelphia 76ers general manager Daryl Morey said his team needs to force more turnovers and get bigger, younger and more athletic. The physicality of the game demands it.

“It’s a complete slugfest out there right now, something resembling the basketball of my youth in the late ’80s, early ’90s,” Morey said during an interview on The Rights To Ricky Sanchez. “And you need to get easy baskets, and that’s going to come through uptempo, offensive rebounding. And you just need to be able to sustain the high level of intensity for a whole game.”

Morey said the Sixers weren’t built for “the new MMA NBA,” citing the increased grabbing and holding that was going uncalled in the playoffs. The Thunder were. In Lu Dort and Alex Caruso, they have two of the league’s premier point-of-attack defenders, and their team defense has apparently put the term “swarm” into the basketball lexicon. They haven’t invented a new scheme or anything, but, in the pace-and-space era, no team has made it more difficult for opponents to attack the paint.

“We just have a bunch of guys that want to take the ball from you,” Caruso said in a recent New York Times Magazine feature by Sam Anderson. “We don’t feel like we’re trying to stop you from scoring. We feel like we’re influencing you to give us the ball.”

The Thunder aren’t as experienced as the average championship team, but they never saw this as a weakness. Their youth and depth didn’t just allow them to withstand the rigors of the regular season and the increased intensity of the playoffs — coach Mark Daigneualt weaponized these attributes the whole way through. Some of this is straightforward: OKC often played an extremely aggressive brand of defense, using its collective speed and length to make opponents as uncomfortable as possible, then turning stops into easy baskets on the other end.

The Thunder could shift shapes, though. When they played big men Isaiah Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren together, they forced fewer turnovers and weren’t as fast, but they controlled the boards and, as Caruso might say, influenced opponents to take tons of long 2s. On Sunday, they started the double-big lineup, but went without a center entirely for multiple stretches and, for the second game in a row, came out of halftime with Caruso in Hartenstein’s place.

“We don’t know how the game is going to go,” Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault told reporters shortly before Game 7 tipped off. “We just let it play out how it does. But I think one of the strengths of our team this season and the experiences we’ve had is we have won games a lot of different ways. We’ve had a lot of wins and none of them have been the same. They are all different. We’ve figured out ways to solve the puzzle of a game on a lot of different nights and that’s given us a lot of confidence. It keeps us present in the competition.”

At their best, the 2024-25 Thunder were an absolute terror on defense and more than the sum of their parts on offense. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander might be the game’s premier one-on-one creator, but they empowered Jalen Williams and Holmgren to expand their games and used Hartenstein as an initiator because they wanted to be more unpredictable. They knew that, when playoff games got grimy, they’d still be able to lean on Gilgeous-Alexander, who scored 29 points, dished 12 assists and turned the ball over only once on Sunday.

“The playoffs are inconvenient,” Daigneault said. “It’s hard to score.” Against elite teams that have studied your every tendency, teams have to “win possessions in the mud.” At this time of year, he said, “it is more about your floor than about your ceiling because, once you get into these series against a great team, that’s what you fall to a lot of times.”

Oklahoma City was not flawless en route to the championship — it shot 11 for 40 (27.5%) from 3-point range in the clincher — but its floor was extremely high. This is a testament to Gilgeous-Alexander’s individual brilliance, general manager Sam Presti assembling a team with all sorts of options and Daigneault spending the regular season experimenting with them. Regardless of the rotation the Thunder used on a given night, they had the same luxury that last year’s champs did: There were no weak links on the floor.

During the Larry O’Brien Trophy presentation, Daigneault described OKC as “an uncommon team” and Presti said the players “represent all that’s good at a young age: They prioritize winning. They prioritize sacrifice. And it just kind of unfolded very quickly.” Gilgeous-Alexander, the newly named Finals MVP, called Williams “a once-in-a-lifetime player” and said that the award was just as much Williams’ as his own. While other teams can’t use the Thunder’s roster as a template, they must understand how high of a bar they have to clear now. It’s not just OKC that everybody else has to prepare for; it’s all the tests that OKC passed. 

In addition to top-tier talent and a bit of luck, to be the last team standing you need to be able to survive a long regular season, adjust to radically different playoff opponents, impose your will physically and win games on the margins. The Thunder made winning look easy for much of their historically dominant regular season. Their Finals run showed how hard it really is.