The Unprecedented Coronation of the Oklahoma City Thunder

NBANBAOKC is one of the youngest, and most statistically dominant, champions in NBA history. Game 7 was more than a capstone to an all-time-great season—it also marked the start of a potentially paradigm-shifting run.

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By Danny ChauJune 23, 6:28 am UTC • 6 min

In the end, as the fever dream of one of the most compelling NBA Finals in recent memory dissipated with one course-altering tumble, all that was left was an unfamiliar sense of inevitability. The Oklahoma City Thunder are 2025 NBA champions, winning their first-ever Larry O’Brien trophy in a 103-91 Game 7 rock fight against the Indiana Pacers, an almost mystical force that, with each passing game appeared to be a team of destiny. But the hall of mirrors that those Pacers trapped the Thunder in finally shattered with 4:55 remaining in the first quarter, when Tyrese Haliburton collapsed to the floor and succumbed to a devastating fate: a ruptured Achilles tendon in the same leg as a calf strain he suffered earlier in the series. It felt eerily similar to the moment in the 2019 Finals when Kevin Durant suffered the same injury. Durant—Oklahoma City’s original golden child—of course, was traded just hours before these Thunder accomplished what he never could for the city. The line between star-crossed deja vu and poetic justice is evidently Reaper-slim.

This matchup has always felt bound by a symmetry across time, but in what should have been a momentous coronation at the altar of hoops, the air was briefly sucked out of the arena. There was hope scattered throughout portions of the game: T.J. McConnell was the entire Pacers offense for an unfortunate spell; Bennedict Mathurin’s sheer will looked like it might have rattled a Thunder team that had become deeply familiar with Indiana’s heroics. But in the end, there simply wasn’t enough.

Game 7 could very well be remembered as one of the biggest what-ifs in league history. There were plenty of tears on the Pacer bench as the clock wound down, knowing just how close they came, knowing just how long the road back might be. That is, unfortunately, what Achilles ruptures do—they snap into perspective a daunting timeline long past the immediate future.

But on the other side of heartbreak lie the Thunder, who, for years, stressed the long view, only for everything to align ahead of schedule. Now, the team of the future has reached the pinnacle in the present. By just about every metric, the Thunder put together one of the all-time great seasons in NBA history, imposing their will with a style that went counter to the league’s dominant template. Less offense, more defense. Less 3s, more midrange. An all-time great defense that emphasizes aggressive playmaking and rotations rather than relying on anchor points in the paint (although it excels there, too, with Chet Holmgren setting a new Finals record with five blocks in Game 7). And on Sunday, OKC finally exhibited one of the hallmarks of its legendary season: a demoralizing two-way assault in the third quarter, the kind that leaves teams wondering what the hell just happened. The Thunder outscored the Pacers by 14 in the third frame of Game 7, mirroring their outrageous third-quarter net rating during the regular season: 14 points per 100 possessions, the highest such mark since the Kevin Durant–era Warriors in 2016-17 and 2017-18.

None of it would work without Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who had a game befitting his now-rarefied air: a forceful 29 points and a 12-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. SGA both played the hits while also giving a preview of the next major step in his development as a playmaker. It was the capstone to one of the greatest single seasons a player could possibly register. Engine to one of the best regular-season records in NBA history. Scoring champion. Most Valuable Player. Finals MVP. And now, NBA champion. The only other players to accomplish that are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, and Shaquille O’Neal.

The Thunder have been blessed with plenty of stars over the course of their 17 years in Oklahoma City, but there is something about SGA’s steadiness that sets him apart. Durant, for a brief moment, was Mr. Unreliable, a watershed moment that likely led KD down the path of disillusionment that has made him one of the greatest Twitter users of all time. At his peak, Russell Westbrook’s berserker intensity was life-affirming, but that kind of energy is hardly sustainable; down the stretch, either Westbrook had the requisite reserves, or he’d lose control of his facilities, akin to a child raging against bedtime. James Harden, Paul George, Chris Paul—great players, but historically shaky at finishing the task at hand. Love him or hate him, SGA got it done. And that changes everything—about the arc of the Thunder to this point, and how we might project them into the future.

Where the original Thunder blueprint with Durant and Westbrook was more a song of ice and fire, the current plan hews closer to that of the dynastic Chicago Bulls: two perimeter stars whose two-way skills intersect and overlap in ways that, even as they round into their own distinct forms, reinforce the identity of the other. Jalen Williams’s steady maturation into a bonafide second option in these playoffs has given credence to this notion, something Tim McMahon recently detailed (and got Scottie Pippen to co-sign) for ESPN. Ironically, none of this would be possible if the Los Angeles Clippers hadn’t reached for a similar blueprint in the summer of 2019, when they traded away SGA for Paul George to be the Scottie to Kawhi Leonard’s MJ.

Blueprints, of course, can’t account for luck or the erosion of time—which is why it helps that the Thunder are the youngest team to win the championship since the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers nearly 50 years ago. Those Blazers were led by a 24-year-old Bill Walton in the healthiest season of his vanishingly short peak. They are a reminder of how ephemeral success at the highest levels of the sport can be — Haliburton’s untimely injury on Sunday only further hammers home that reality. Those Blazers, still holding onto their place in the record books, nearly half a century later, are also a reflection of how unprecedented this Thunder team is in the continuum of modern basketball. The average weighted age (factoring in how many minutes were played at each age rather than a raw average) of a championship team across league history is roughly 28 years old. The Thunder’s over the course of this championship run was 24.6, nearly a full four-year graduating class younger.

Every championship grants a ticket to immortality, but not every championship holds the same weight of significance across time. Some champions become cultural bellwethers, winning in a manner so utterly convincing or confoundingly novel that it tilts the entire league paradigm on its head, setting in stone the beginning of a new epoch. Ten years ago, the 2014-15 Golden State Warriors altered the composition of what championship DNA could look like. Those Warriors transcended what had long felt like the final frontier of basketball truisms. They lived and died by the 3 and dominated. An entire generation of players, coaches, executives, and fans affirmed that reality in the decade since, nearly to the point of basketball monoculture. But the winds are changing.

Eight of the 10 youngest teams to have ever won an NBA championship played between 1951 and 1980. (And, let’s be real: a 25-year-old from the ’50s is both biologically and psychologically closer to a person in their 40s today than they are to a modern 25-year-old.) The only other modern team in the cohort? Those 2014-15 Warriors. Ten years later, when the Warriors’ revolutionary influence has simply become the norm, the Thunder’s ascendance signals a new shift.

Amid a still-raw collective bargaining agreement that went into effect less than two years ago—with major limitations on team spending and “superteam” constructions that defined much of the previous era—OKC’s masterful roster construction has become the ideal leaguewide model. And it is likely to be just as easy to replicate as it was for teams to find “the next Draymond Green” or copy a high-octane offense that could function only with the greatest shooter who has ever lived.

Memory is a precarious thing. There’s no telling how we might remember Game 7 years down the line. It was officially a coronation in Oklahoma City, but it was also a tragic ending for a team that had become unlikely postseason protagonists. We’ll play the what-if game for years to come, but in the meantime, there’s no avoiding the inevitability of a new era. Game 7 was the final punctuation mark on a Thunder season that long felt like a transmission from the future. Oklahoma City has revolutionized the accelerated timeline. As ever, revolutions are for the young.