The Oklahoma City Thunder Are Rolling — But Are They Playoff-Ready?
The Oklahoma City Thunder Are Rolling — But Are They Playoff-Ready?
Despite being led by young, talented players like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren, OKC may be missing a key championship ingredient.
If Tuesday’s clash between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics offered a preview of things to come in the NBA Finals — with both teams on track for high seeds in their respective conferences — then the Thunder put the rest of the league on notice. Jumping out to a double-digit lead after three quarters, OKC held on for the 127-123 win and added to what has been one of the best starts to a season in franchise history.
Before the year began, my colleague Jared Dubin wrote that the Thunder were the NBA’s future, and nothing has disproved that prediction so far. Despite carrying the league’s youngest roster in terms of average age (weighted by minutes played), Oklahoma City has also been the league’s third-best team by net rating so far in 2023-24, with an average scoring margin of +8.3 points per 100 possessions. No other team that ranks among the NBA’s elite in net rating is even close to the Thunder in terms of pure youth:
So what’s not to like about OKC’s chances to carry that success over into the playoffs? Why do they sit sixth in The Messenger’s NBA forecast model, with just a 4% chance to win the title?
Well, there’s just one slight problem with all of that youthful exuberance. While it portends well for the team’s long-term title chances, squads with little to no previous postseason experience tend to underperform in the playoffs — and that might be the main factor standing in OKC’s way this season.
Looking at Oklahoma City’s 2023-24 roster, only four players (Dāvis Bertāns, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luguentz Dort and Isaiah Joe) have played any previous minutes in their postseason careers. Weighted by their playing time this regular season, the average member of the Thunder has played just 91.2 previous career playoff minutes; only the San Antonio Spurs (57.3) have less playoff experience on their roster — and unlike the Thunder, they have essentially zero chance of actually putting it to use in the playoffs anyway.
To put that number in further context: Since 2002-03, when the playoffs expanded to the modern format of a best-of-seven series in all rounds, the average roster member of an NBA champion had 1,699 previous minutes of postseason experience. No champ checked in with less than 715 minutes of previous postseason experience on average — a distinction that belonged to the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons. And, at the same time, no team with under 100 minutes of average playoff experience advanced so far as the conference finals; the only such team to even win a series at all was the 2004-05 Washington Wizards, with their previous average experience of 78.1 playoff minutes.
That alone speaks to how unprecedented a deep playoff run would be for this unseasoned OKC group. But seldom has a team this inexperienced also been this good. The Thunder’s +8.3 net rating is tracking to be by far the best of any team with fewer than 100 minutes of previous average playoff experience, beating out the 2008-09 Portland Trail Blazers’ +6.1 mark. Or, to put things a slightly different way, OKC easily has the least previous playoff experience of any team with a net rating of +7 or better since 2003 (the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns ranked second, with an average previous experience of 448.7 minutes).
No matter how you look at it, the Thunder are clearly trying to overcome their lack of experience with sheer talent. But that’s easier said than done.
We can see how much of an effect not having been there before has on a team in the postseason by looking at how many playoff wins they produce versus what we would expect from their regular-season net rating. (With expected wins being set via regression analysis.) Again since 2003, playoff teams in the top 25% by previous postseason experience tended to outperform their expected results by 1.4 wins on average, while teams in the bottom 25% in experience underperformed by 0.7 wins on average. Overall, there is a clear relationship between a team’s average level of postseason experience and its tendency to outperform (or underperform) expectations in the playoffs, particularly in extreme instances:
One might fairly wonder if this relationship is a case of causation or simply correlation, given how teams with a lot of postseason experience tend to ease off in subsequent regular seasons. (For instance, Tom Haberstroh found that defending champs tend to almost always finish under their preseason Vegas win totals.) In those cases, their regular season net rating isn’t what it could be if they pushed harder, and postseason experience explains much of the gap between the two numbers. But given how much parity the NBA has had recently — with five different champions in five seasons — that means there are plenty of battle-tested teams out there, ready to exceed their regular season resumes against a team like the Thunder in the playoffs.
OKC does have its own not-so-secret weapon in the fight against more seasoned opponents. Gilgeous-Alexander, who already emerged as an All-NBA-level star last season, has been even better this year, ranking first in my Estimated RAPTOR Wins Above Replacement rankings and rising up the MVP ladder. SGA has been so good that he might be able to single-handedly make up for some of the problems with Oklahoma City’s inexperience.
To investigate this, I set up another regression analysis that accounted for not only a team’s previous playoff experience but also the WAR (per 82 scheduled team games) of its best player during the regular season. While the effect of star talent for a team’s best player has about half the power of postseason experience in terms of predicting whether that team will exceed regular-season expectations during the playoffs, Gilgeous-Alexander’s league-leading pace of 21.4 WAR per 82 team games is so great — seriously, it’s on the same order with some of Michael Jordan and LeBron James’s best seasons — that we would predict it to completely cancel out the negative effect of OKC’s low playoff experience.
This comes with the caveat that SGA does need to play at such a historic level all regular season long — OKC has 50 more games left on its schedule — and stay in the lineup practically every night as well. (While only missing one game so far in 2023-24, he sat for an average of 25.7 games per season over the previous three years.) Both of those things might be less true by the time the playoffs arrive, which would dampen his predicted effect on the Thunder’s title ceiling.
But regardless, Oklahoma City clearly has a championship-tier No. 1 player now in the form of Gilgeous-Alexander (and possibly a borderline No. 2 in Chet Holmgren). The only question is whether that will be enough to overcome OKC’s lack of seasoning on the game’s brightest stage — or if the Thunder need to use this season to gain more experience before truly gunning for a title in the future.
Filed under: NBA