The Thunder have spent the last two seasons turning the regular season into a demolition job. Last December’s 49-point wipeout of the Suns pushed Oklahoma City to 24-1 and tied the 2015-16 Warriors for the best 25-game start in NBA history.
The 2024-25 club finished with 64 wins, and the season before that one ended with a 12.7 net rating - the best mark in NBA history this side of the 1995-96 Bulls. Even last year’s slightly smaller number, 11.1, still placed the Thunder among the top 10 regular-season teams ever.
That kind of run is going to be harder to repeat.
With a new season about to begin, the league’s latest lottery reform and Oklahoma City’s thinner roster point in the same direction: fewer easy wins, fewer runaway blowouts and probably no more historic net ratings. The Thunder’s regular-season dominance is likely to cool off. Probably.
The biggest league-wide change is the NBA’s “3-2-1” lottery system, which was passed in May and starts this season. Commissioner Adam Silver and the league finally moved after another ugly tanking year, one in which eight teams finished at least 30 games under .500. All but the Pelicans were clearly chasing draft position, even after the NBA flattened lottery odds in 2019.
Under the new setup, the 16 lottery teams will receive three, two or one balls in the drawing. The three teams with the worst records will be “draft relegated,” getting one fewer lottery ball than the other seven non-playoff, non-play-in teams.
No team can pick first overall in back-to-back drafts or in the top five in three straight drafts. And teams four through 10 in the reverse standings all sit at an 8.1% chance of landing the No. 1 pick, with the same descending odds for the rest of the lottery order.
The ninth and 10th play-in teams will now have the same shot at the lottery’s top prizes as the three worst teams. That should change the late-season calculus.
Instead of fighting to lose, bad teams will have incentive to keep winning and avoid the bottom three. The end result should be fewer stretches where clubs sit starters, hide healthy players with “injuries,” or otherwise steer themselves toward the worst possible record.
For the Thunder, that means a tougher path to the easy wins that padded recent totals. It also means fewer blowouts where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sits the entire fourth quarter, which could chip away at his overall numbers and lighten the kind of stat padding that comes with those runaway games.
Even if Oklahoma City still ends up around 60 wins - FanDuel has its over/under at 61.5 - the chance of another double-digit net rating looks slim. Detroit and San Antonio each won 60-plus games last season and finished with an 8.4 net rating, a useful reminder that big win totals do not always come with historic margins.
The old tanking era may have helped inflate both wins and blowouts, and the league may never go fully dead-ball on the other side. But the gap between the best and the worst should be narrower now.
The Thunder’s own roster changes add another layer to the projection. They survived major injuries over the last two seasons - Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein among them - because the depth was outrageous.
That version of the roster is gone now. Oklahoma City still has excellent depth, but not the kind that made people wonder how it was all legal.
Cost-cutting trades sent Lu Dort, Isaiah Joe and Aaron Wiggins away, with the Thunder receiving no players and a collection of second-round picks in return. Those three were among Oklahoma City’s top six players in total minutes since the start of the 2024-25 season. Sam Presti did what he could under the circumstances, but two of those roster spots have been filled by rookies Aday Mara and Bennett Stirtz, while the third remains open.
Mara and Stirtz both impressed in the preseason, and they’ll see real minutes. Still, they are new faces replacing a seven-year starter and two veteran bench pieces.
That matters in the regular season, where teams need reliable innings eaters. Dort, Wiggins and Joe gave the Thunder exactly that.
So yes, the Thunder are a little less automatic now. The new lottery system should help reduce the kind of nightly mismatch that fed recent win totals, and the roster no longer has the same cushion it did when injuries piled up last year.
Still, none of that changes the bigger picture. Oklahoma City remains set up for the long haul with a generational GM, a championship coach, the back-to-back MVP and a Big Three that still has room to bloom. The only real obstacle is cost.
That’s why the call here is a Thunder season under 61.5 wins and a net rating below 10.0. And even with that, the pick is still Oklahoma City to win the NBA title.
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Oklahoma Citys focus now shifts to cleaner execution and the kind of offensive sharpness that can separate a contender from a team still ironing out details in October. A matchup with the Spurs should help answer some of those questions, especially with young players being thrown into a high-leverage setting right away and the first game offering a clearer read on how ready the Thunder are to handle the seasons early pressure. [Read more 🡒]
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Mitchells work against Austin Reaves drew particular attention, since his defensive impact helped tilt the series in Oklahoma Citys favor. For Williams, who watched the whole thing unfold from the sideline, the takeaway was bigger than one hot stretch in the postseason. The Thunder may have found another player who can change a series, and if Williams is healthy going forward, that kind of added versatility could matter even more. [Read more 🡒]