The Thunder Finally Struck
Oklahoma City outlasted the Pacers to win the 2025 NBA title — the franchise’s first since moving from Seattle... and maybe the league’s last before a new dynasty takes hold.
Already coming on the heels of historic parity in the league, this was not looking like the year when order returned to the NBA. Chaos reigned throughout a 2025 postseason where the powerhouse Celtics and Cavs bowed out early, the seasoned Nuggets and Warriors came up empty, the T-Wolves and Knicks fell short, and the Finals featured two Heartland teams who’d never won a championship in their current cities and/or leagues before — going a full seven games in a series with countless twists and turns.
But by the end of Sunday’s NBA Finals Game 7, at least some measure of balance had been restored: The Oklahoma City Thunder — long a trendy pick for the league’s future — officially became its championship present.
OKC’s Finals win over the Indiana Pacers capped a playoff run in which their talent was tested plenty, but they ultimately proved mature enough to finish their task. And unlike some of the other new champions in the NBA’s recent, unprecedented seven-year run of unique winners, this one doesn’t feel like a one-off as much as the beginning of a brand-new era.
I’ve written a few times before in honor of teams where it was just Their Year. And in the NBA, the 2024-25 season more or less belonged to the Thunder from start to finish.
By most metrics, Oklahoma City had one of the most dominant title seasons in recent memory. They finished No. 1 in net rating, led the league in defense by a huge margin and boasted the MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. They won 68 regular-season games and dispatched the Grizzlies, Nuggets and Wolves in succession before outlasting Indiana — a Finals foe that posed real challenges throughout, but one the Thunder ultimately solved against a shorthanded Indy roster in Game 7.
Would things have been different if Tyrese Haliburton didn’t go down with a crushing injury early on Sunday night? We’ll never know — it’s a question that will haunt Indy for a long time. But that shouldn’t overshadow how good these Thunder were. By the playoffs’ end, OKC finished with the third-highest full-season net rating (+11.9) in post-merger NBA history, trailing only Michael Jordan’s 1995-96 Chicago Bulls and the KD/Curry/Draymond/Klay 2016-17 Warriors:
Market size aside, this title wasn't some kind of Cinderella story, either. OKC’s rise to the top of the league was the logical conclusion of a modern rebuild done right: GM Sam Presti spent years collecting countless draft picks, trading for (and developing) stars and avoiding the quick-fix pitfalls that derailed other would-be contenders. This roster is what Presti envisioned when he stockpiled all of those assets and bet on coach Mark Daigneault to lead them. The Thunder were the league’s best team all season — they just needed to prove it on the biggest stage.
Of course, doing that had admittedly been a problem just one year ago.
The 2023-24 team had the best net rating of any ultra-young squad in a long while, but as I wrote at the time, they were short on the one trait most title teams share: Playoff experience. The average Oklahoma City rotation player had logged just 91.2 previous career playoff minutes — the lowest for any contender in at least two decades. Teams so inexperienced rarely survive the crucible of May and June, and sure enough, the Thunder lost in the second round to a Dallas Mavericks team whose regular-season résumé paled in comparison with OKC’s.
They learned from the loss, however, and when 2024-25 rolled around, the Thunder came back older, wiser and more prepared. By the late stages of this year’s playoffs, their postseason body of work had grown immensely, and so had their confidence. Game 7 was a showcase in composure and focus — everything critics had once said they lacked. OKC didn’t get rattled by the emotional swings of the night, from Haliburton’s exit to Indiana’s mid-game surge, and they methodically asserted themselves until the title was won.
Naturally, no team can stake their claim to all-time greatness without a signature superstar to match, which is where Gilgeous-Alexander comes in. SGA became the first player since LeBron James in 2013 to win both the NBA’s regular-season and Finals MVP awards in the same season. He averaged 30 PPG, hit late-game daggers when needed, carried the Thunder offense otherwise, and finally got the ring his extraordinary career arc deserved.
And he had help, from Chet Holmgren’s rim protection and Jalen Williams’ versatility to Cason Wallace’s defense, Lu Dort’s surprising shooting, Alex Caruso’s two-way play and an overall deep, unselfish roster that gave OKC the league’s most complete team.
Technically speaking, Oklahoma City is just the latest in a string of new champs — again, they’re the seventh different franchise to win a title in as many seasons, an NBA first. But this doesn’t feel like the Raptors did in 2019, or maybe even the Bucks in 2021 or the Nuggets in 2023. This one seems more sustainable for the long haul: the Thunder are young, talented, well-coached and run with a long-term strategic purpose. Their core ought to be together for the foreseeable future. They’ll surely enter next season as favorites to win again — with a strong chance to end the Era of Parity and usher in a reborn age of dynastic NBA basketball.
If the past seven seasons were defined by surprising unpredictability, 2024-25 might be remembered in hindsight as the year the league began to pivot back to the order and structure it’s usually known for… even if a historic championship upset was on the table right down to the season’s final day. And if that’s the case, Oklahoma City would go down as the team that steered the change — all starting with the Year of the Thunder.
Filed under: NBA
I'll need to dig up some receipts but I'm pretty sure that after the Nuggets won it all, everyone was like "this is the new dynasty" then last year everyone said "the Celtics are set up to win the next 4 championships". I agree that, in this moment, the Thunder are set up to be a dynasty. We'll see if they go through the same defending champion malaise every other team has faced recently...