By Nick Gallo | Broadcast Reporter and Digital Editor | okcthunder.com
The work the Thunder has done on offense has come to fruition this year, but it’s a blooming that’s years in the making.
It comes out of the rooting and struggling of the 2020-21 season. It’s about last year’s youth influx and continuity build and it’s about all the work that has gone into the Thunder’s offensive eruption this season.
It even dates to something Thunder General Manager Sam Presti has been talking about since before this iteration of the team existed, even years prior to last April when he coined the phrase “less patterns, more rhythm”.
“For us, speed and tempo are different than just getting up the floor,” Presti said back in 2018. “We want to be faster making decisions on both sides of the floor. We want to be faster, obviously physically, but we want to be faster in how quickly we recognize situations within the game. We want to be faster and play with more speed with respect to how quickly we recover from setbacks in terms of our resiliency and our turnaround time. These are all parts of playing fast.”
For three consecutive seasons the Thunder has been one of the youngest teams in the NBA, and for the last two it has been not only the youngest, but the youngest in league history. That old sports cliché about “the game slowing down” doesn’t typically apply until players reach their fourth or fifth years in the league. If the game slows down, it’s natural that you can process it faster, but if you’ve looked up and down the Thunder rotation these last few years, most of the players had three or fewer years under their belts.
With time and experience, a team that is trying to play faster can catalyze significant growth with both a tenacious work ethic and a focus on that quick decision-making that Presti laid out a half-decade ago. This season, the result for the Thunder has been the fifth biggest year-over-year increase in points per game for any NBA team since the shot clock was introduced – from 103.7 last year to 117.9 this year (+14.2).
This didn’t happen because of a splashy offseason free-agent signing, a blockbuster trade, a coaching change or even with the services of its number two overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft – Chet Holmgren. Instead, it’s happened with internal growth and a commitment to making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Elsewhere in the NBA there’s a “bias for action”, another phrase Presti has used for over a decade, but the Thunder recognizes the value of letting a plant nestle into its soil and search for the light, rather than impatiently scooping it out and into another patch of dirt.
By investing for multiple years running in an offensive style that leans on rapid ball and player movement, relentless cutting and selfless passing, the Thunder has raised both its offensive ceiling and its floor, achieving a remarkable level of consistency despite its youth. Through trial and error, though unique lineups and dynamic player combinations, building through the draft and finding talent all over the globe and under others’ noses, the Thunder is building a roster and a style of play that is adaptive to the modern era.
“We’ve had a willingness from a strategic standpoint and a team-building standpoint to chase excellence, and sometimes risk failure in the process,” said Thunder Head Coach Mark Daigneault. “Developmentally with our players and with how we coach the team and things we do, I think to align with that philosophy we have to be willing to do things a little bit differently, and we're not afraid to do that in pursuit of excellence.”
This year’s team has twice set Thunder records for points in a game with 150 against Boston, the team with the NBA’s best record, and 153 against Houston, the team with the NBA’s worst record. In addition to those high-water marks, the Thunder has avoided low tide nights. OKC failed to reach 100 points in a game 52 combined times during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons but has only fallen short of that century mark twice this year in 57 games played.
Playing faster, as Presti described, is one avenue to ensure that the scoreboard keeps on moving, but the fact that the Thunder ranks third in the NBA in pace (possessions per game) is only one part of the story. The way that OKC has executed inside of the half-court, how quickly it transfers the ball on out of bounds plays and how it treats offensive rebounds like fast breaks are all layers onto the offensive eruption. A Thunder team who sat in 30th in points per game last season has vaulted itself to third in that same category this year, becoming just the fourth team in NBA history to finish last in points per game and then in the top five the following season.
“When we're playing fast, we're playing ahead of the defense and we're playing together, we're pretty good,” said the Thunder’s 2023 All-Star, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. “We get a lot of good looks. The better the looks, the more points you score.”
"We want to be faster, obviously physically, but we want to be faster in how quickly we recognize situations within the game."
—Thunder General Manager Sam Presti
As a leader, it’s undeniable that the 24-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander has modeled total buy-in, helping foster the Thunder’s environment of generating rhythm for everyone on the floor, not just for the guy who scores the most points. Gilgeous-Alexander is having a career-year, averaging 30.8 points per game on 50.8 percent shooting to go with 5.7 assists per game. Yet with SGA’s approach of picking his spots, playing both off of and crucially for his teammates with screens, well-timed cuts and decoy actions, the Thunder has been able to create the type of offensive balance and unpredictability that is maddening to opponents.
“We’ve got five guys that can make plays and handle the ball and that's a big luxury to have,” said second-year guard Josh Giddey. “When we're doing that - when we're getting out playing and moving the ball, being unselfish, our offense flows.”
The Thunder has gotten six different players into double figures scoring in 13 different games this year, it has scored over 50 points in the paint in 47 of 57 games and racked up at least 20 assists in 48 of 57 games this year. Alongside Gilgeous-Alexander, the 20-year-old Giddey has thrived, scoring 16.3 points per game on 48.9 percent shooting, hitting double figures in 48 of his 52 games while still leading the team in assists.
Rookie, 21-year-old Jalen Williams is fourth among rookies in scoring (12.2 points) on over 50 percent shooting from the field. Wings Kenrich Williams and Aaron Wiggins are shooting 36 percent or better from three, as are forwards Aleksej Pokuševski and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl. Then there’s newcomer Isaiah Joe, whose 45.2 percent from deep puts him first in the NBA in that category. In OKC, you can be scooped off the scrap heap and into the cream of the crop.
Joe has spearheaded a bench unit that has made 40 more 3-pointers than any other team in the league this season and has outscored opponent’s bench units in 36 of 57 games this year. Who is on that unit changes night to night though, as OKC is second in the NBA with 25 different starting lineups played. While the Thunder has remained unpredictable in which players will impact a given game, the team’s play style has crystalized in both the starting and reserve units. Defensive rebounds or turnovers quickly result in fast break conversions, but when slowed down the half-court offense is predicated on generating advantages with drives – a category in which OKC leads the league by a Canadian County mile.
Once opponents are forced to put two defenders on the ball or crash over to help a beaten man, Thunder cutters fly in from various directions in a coordinated attack to pick apart the seams in the defense that the team calls “burns”. Baseline drives equal cuts from the angle, drives through the elbows are met with catch-ready hands at the dunker spot. On the wings, marksmen slide into open passing channels and bury those coveted catch-and-shoot looks. Screeners roll or pop and are always ready to swing the ball to the other side of the floor to start up the action again. Everyone is a playmaker. Everyone is a play finisher.
On the front end a home-and-home series against the Rockets in early February, the Thunder’s offense got bogged down by a Houston team that loaded up defenders at the elbows and the nails, enticing OKC to play in bogged down crowds. It was one of the rare games all year the Thunder struggled to generate easy offense.
A few nights later, back in Oklahoma City, Mark Daigneault opted not to show any film to the team during their pregame session. This young group has a better understanding of itself and what it needs to do than it did the past two years. It was an opportunity for the team to take its own reigns, and the Thunder hung a hundred and a half on Houston while playing its desired brand of basketball.
The Thunder and its players aren’t results-oriented, but the process-based approach is geared toward generating the types of results this organization is striving for over the long term. As learned habits have become more second nature and the team is coalescing as a collective, the results are starting to become more consistently positive, with added internal clarity of how to reproduce that formula of preparation and discipline between and during games.
In years past the Thunder was a team that was learning NBA vocabulary and observing the landscape. It is now sentient, with a conscious identity. It owns its own destiny, with a chance to not just declare itself further in the final 25 games of this regular season, but more importantly to continuing steeling its stamina for the mountain climb in the years ahead.
“The past two years we've had some rough waters, but it's never once impacted the feeling around the team day to day and it's never once bitten into our work capacity,” said Daigneault. “We've won more games this year. We're gaining confidence. But the environment in the gym every day, the environment in the building, the locker room and the way the guys are approaching their business, those habits have already been formed. Now it's a matter of not taking our eye off that.”