The Oklahoma City Thunder Just Won the NBA Title—and They’re About to Get a Whole Lot Better

Thunder forward Jalen Williams celebrates during the second half of Oklahoma City’s win in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

Oklahoma City

All season long, the Oklahoma City Thunder had been the NBA’s most dominant team—one that specialized in blowouts and the total elimination of suspense.

When it came to finishing the job and winning the city’s first ever championship, though, the Thunder still needed to survive one of the most nerve-racking challenges in sports: a Game 7 in the NBA Finals.

But just as it has with every other test this season has thrown up, the Thunder passed with flying colors. In front of a feverish home crowd on Sunday night, Oklahoma City beat the Indiana Pacers 103-91, to secure the franchise’s first title since it relocated from Seattle in 2008.

But the most frightening thing for the rest of the NBA isn’t the records this young Thunder team set in the regular season or the championship it just claimed.

It’s that the Thunder are just getting started.

Oklahoma City has the youngest team in the NBA, with a stockpile of superstars who haven’t even reached their prime years, plus an embarrassment of future draft picks on the way. All of which means that the scariest team in basketball could shortly get a whole lot scarier.

That may be hard to imagine for the Pacers, who lost their superstar point guard Tyrese Haliburton in the first quarter, and then watched the Thunder run away from them in the final two quarters. What had been a 1-point lead at the half turned into a 12-point deficit at the buzzer. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the league’s MVP and leading scorer, finished the game with 29 points. Jalen Williams, his co-star, scored 20.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander shoots the ball during a standout performance against the Indiana Pacers in Game 7.

There was no denying that the Haliburton injury changed the game dramatically. He had entered Game 7 nursing a calf injury, before collapsing to the hardwood midway barely seven minutes in. He was done for the night—and so, too, were Indiana’s best chances for a championship. Haliburton’s father John later told ESPN that his son had sustained an Achilles injury.

Without their leader, the Pacers hung tough but couldn’t match the Thunder’s firepower. Three straight 3-pointers early in the second half stretched out a nine-point Oklahoma City lead. Time and again, the hard-pressing Thunder defense ripped the ball away from the Pacers and sprinted the length of the floor for layups.

For the Thunder, the victory set off a long-awaited celebration. Since the Seattle SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City and changed their name in 2008, fans in one of the NBA’s smallest markets have loyally backed the team.

The Thunder had made it to the brink of a championship before, led at that time by Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, but lost in the 2012 Finals to LeBron James and the Miami Heat. (Even the Sonics had only managed a single title in their entire history, dating back to 1967.)

When Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton fell to the court with an injury, Indiana’s championship hopes were all but doomed.

Though they were pushed to the limit by the Pacers in a seven-game series, the Thunder are now set up as a dynasty in the making. At a time when generational icons such as James and Stephen Curry are starting to age out of relevance, Oklahoma City general manager Sam Presti has built basketball’s greatest youth movement in the heartland.

A single trade, in 2019, brought Gilgeous-Alexander to the Thunder, as well as a haul of five first-round draft picks; one of which turned into Williams. Those two All-Stars are just 26 and 24 years old, and the youth of the rest of the roster—the oldest player on the entire team is 31—means that Oklahoma City can play a frenetic, hard-pressing defensive style that puts the clamps on even the highest-flying offenses.

The Pacers learned how effective that can be the hard way. A team that had blitzed through the season scoring 117.4 points per game was held well below its average.

Presti isn’t out of moves to make. Nikola Topic, last year’s first-round pick, is due back after missing the entire season with a torn ACL. And Oklahoma City has a whopping 13 first-round picks over the next seven drafts, giving them the ultimate flexibility to maintain their roster with young players or package those assets in the trade market.

For a city that has waited lifetimes to celebrate a championship, Sunday might not just be the end of a long journey. It might be the beginning of a new annual tradition.