Be Afraid of the Oklahoma City Thunder. Be Very Afraid.
Whatever happens in these NBA Finals, OKC's time is now — and tomorrow, and probably the day after that, too.
It can be tough to make sweeping predictions about the future of the NBA at a time like this. The league is guaranteed to have a seventh different champion in seven seasons — no matter who wins the 2025 Finals — and time-tested team-building gambits, such as the Superteam, aren’t working anymore.
But if there is any safe bet to be made as we navigate through the NBA’s Parity Era, it might just be the team that won the Western Conference on Wednesday night: the Oklahoma City Thunder.
I previously wrote about the pressure OKC was facing as the lone standard-bearer for the league’s top regular-season teams in the conference finals, and at times that pressure seemed to get in their heads. After winning Games 1-2 against the Minnesota Timberwolves at home, Oklahoma City was absolutely steamrolled by the Wolves in Game 3, trailing by 20 after a quarter en route to a 42-point blowout loss. Surely, the series was on now… except it wasn’t. OKC handled Minnesota late in Game 4, then left no doubt in Game 5 to close out the series.
That now makes them very heavy favorites to win the 2025 title, whether we look at statistical models like my NBA forecast model (86 percent), or the prediction markets like Polymarket (83 percent):
The hype is warranted, based on their body of work — and the core of young talent they’ve done it with.
Across the entire season as a whole, the Thunder are 80-19, only the fourth team in post-merger NBA history to enter the Finals with at least 80 wins on the year — joining the 1995-96 and 1996-97 Chicago Bulls and the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors:
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