In my season preview for the Thunder, I cautioned about the overwhelmingness of great expectations. After the dream scenario played out with a championship parade through Downtown OKC in 2025, very little could happen that would impress the team’s fanbase.
I watched this, from the outside, in 2001.
Despite a decade of utter disappointment that I personally relished, Sooner fans were spoiled by the Bob Stoops/Josh Heupel undefeated run to the 2000 season’s football National Championship. The next year, the team only won 11 games. They only won the Rose Bowl for the first time ever. My Sooner fan friends were totally disappointed by something that would have been considered a fantasy during the John Blake era of my college years. The two losses, a sign of regression by juxtaposition, far outshadowed the successes.
Back to the Thunder, the route to continuing linear growth was narrow. Little could have improved on a previous season that was historically good. As we reflect on the 2025/2026 season and prepare for the 2026 playoffs, we will find that they fell short of our hopes and dreams. There was no surpassing the 2015/2016 Warriors’ record of 73 wins. We have to be satisfied with the 64 they pulled off, which is only two games better than any other team this season.
With that in mind, here are the top-eight lowlights (in no particular order—but numbered anyway) from this nightmare of a season:
8. Not Being Able To Get It Done In Regulation (Or The First Overtime)
Opening night was a fairly perfect set-up. It was at home. It was the first nationally broadcast game for NBC in decades. It was the night the team raised their first championship banner and the players received their rings. In attendance to have his nose rubbed in the thing he never could accomplish, as a member of the opposing team, was former franchise cornerstone Kevin Durant.
The whole production was obviously an emotional scenario, and the basketball played by Oklahoma City was not their best. Just to force overtime, Durant had to miss a free throw and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had to make a jumper with 2.6 seconds left. This nearly was not enough, as Rocket big man Alperen Sengun could have won it at the buzzer, but missed.
Overtime was a slog and there were some questionable calls throughout. The most egregious was Durant grabbing a defensive rebound with seconds left and a tie game, then frantically calling a timeout the team did not possess—a timeout that would have resulted in a technical foul shot that could have clinched the game for the Thunder—in the closing seconds. Afterwards, officials claimed not to have seen it, so instead the last few ticks on the clock expired and the Thunder were forced to win the game in double overtime, after Durant fouled SGA with 2.3 seconds left.
Two days, and a plane flight later, OKC had a rematch against the Indiana Pacers, who nearly crushed the Thunder’s championship aspirations a few months prior. In retrospect, the game should have been a cakewalk, considering the Pacers tanked their way through the season. On this night, though, the Thunder could not shake an Indiana team intent on getting revenge. Until, that is, SGA capped off a 55-point scoring night in another double-overtime game. In doing so, OKC became the first team ever to start off the season with multiple multiple-overtime games.
It also meant that a team coming off a short offseason was forced to play their starters a ton of minutes in their ramp-up. That would soon come back to bite them in the next lowlight.
7. Only Winning 24 Of Their First 25 Games
Coming into the season, the Thunder were riding a four-game winning streak that closed out the 2024/2025 regular season. That streak nearly climbed to 29 games, except for a weird outlier in game nine of this season.
It was the team’s third game in four nights in the middle of a West Coast road trip in front of an always difficult Portland crowd. OKC hit them hard in the first quarter, leading 41-21, but seemed to run out of gas and clung to a five-point lead going into the 4th.
That lead evaporated quickly, and the Blazers led by nine with just two minutes to go. Diving into the energy reserves that were depleted by the season opening marathons, the Thunder managed to get the deficit to three with 6.5 seconds left. In that span, Isaiah Joe missed a three-point shot, then somehow got the ball back in time to get another shot (in which he was fouled) up before the buzzer. Unfortunately, his toe was on the three-point line, or else he would have been at the line with a chance to tie it.
Instead, Portland escaped, and OKC’s ensuing sixteen-game winning streak lost some luster.
6. OKC Still Can’t Get Over The Hump (Of The In-Season Tournament)
One accolade this team still cannot muster is the elusive In-Season Tournament championship. Last season, they made it to the final, only to lose to the Milwaukee Bucks. This season, they ran into the San Antonio Spurs in the semifinals where that sixteen-game streak that was mentioned in the last section was ended – as were the hopes of raising another banner this year.
5. The Nightmare Before (And On) Christmas
On the morning of December 23rd, the Oklahoma City Thunder were 26-3 on the season and their three losses were by a total of nine points. The rest of the basketball world feared them. Many pundits were theorizing that they would catch the Warriors 73 game standard and were predicting that the rest of the league was planning to punt on this season knowing that no one could hope to match them.
That night, the conventional wisdom was turned on its head. Enter the French Alien, Victor Wembanyama, who had been drafted two years prior and expected to dominate the NBA for the next decade. Up until this point, him using his 7’5” frame and guard skills to destroy all opponents had really been more theoretical. In back-to-back games, those predictions came to fruition. He and his San Antonio teammates humbled the mighty Thunder on the 23rd (by 20 points), then did similar in front of a national audience on Christmas Day.
After that, the Thunder had lost three out of four games, were no longer on pace to outdo Golden State’s standard, and hope was lost.
Bah humbug!
4. M*A*S*H Unit
Most teams that go through a bad spell of player health can use it to excuse poor performance. Oklahoma City cannot. Despite what seemed like a never-ending parade of player injuries, the team continued to win. That run of 24 wins in 25 games to start the season? All of that was without reigning 3rd Team All-NBA forward and 2nd Team All-Defense player Jalen Williams. J-Dub would only end up playing 33 games by the end of the season due to surgical recovery from a wrist injury and a nagging hamstring injury he suffered after returning from that.
He was not the only casualty. Big man Isaiah Hartenstein fought a calf injury all season. He missed 35 games, all told.
Was MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander immune from the injury bug? He was not. SGA went down with an abdominal strain just before the All-Star break and missed weeks. If it had not been for that break coinciding with the injury recovery, he probably would not have played enough games to qualify for post-season accolades.
If ab strains were contagious, he probably got it from Ajay Mitchell, who would have been a candidate for Most Improved Player and Sixth Man of the Year had he not missed the nightmare stretch with that same injury.
Health issues plagued the entire roster down to the previous two lottery picks by the team. Thomas Sorber tore his ACL in off-season workouts and has yet to make his NBA debut, while Nikola Topic, who looked to make his debut at the beginning of this season, was diagnosed with ball cancer during the preseason and had to undergo chemo. His return was hugely inspirational despite play that was largely uninspired.
Regardless of all their injury woes that kept their preferred starting lineup from playing more than a handful of games together, the team just kept winning and therefore lost their ability to complain about their misfortune.
3. Getting Bilked By The 76ers
Did Sam Presti finally get bested in a trade? At the trade deadline, the team concocted a deal with the Philadelphia 76ers getting Jared McCain for a late first-rounder in the 2026 draft and three second-round picks.
McCain, a prominent TikToker who gets a manicure before every game, is a goof ball whose personality meshes perfectly with Oklahoma City’s cornucopia of happy-go-lucky players. In addition, he actually looks like a fine ball player that opens the floor by draining threes and provides scoring assistance from the bench. Lineups where he pairs with Isaiah Joe (a.k.a. the JoeCain lineup) are a nightmare to defend.
All of that is great, except 76er GM Daryl Morey insists they sold high on McCain, so I guess that means Presti messed up.
2. Unlucky In The Lottery
Teams that perform like the Oklahoma City Thunder usually are not worried about winning the NBA Draft lottery. However, when Sam Presti assembled a treasure trove of draft picks during the great tear down of 2019, he collected picks from most of the league going well into the future.
Three of those picks he collected were 2026 picks from teams who were not good this year. Unfortunately, the one from Utah was protected if the Jazz’s pick landed in the top-8. Because of that, they tried to lose so hard they had to pay the league half a million dollars in fines, and were bad enough that the pick will not convey.
That is not the case with the Philadelphia and LA Clipper picks that are owed to the Thunder. Both could wind up in the lottery since both teams have to survive the play-in tournament if they are to participate in the playoffs next week. The 76ers, who enter the tournament without their best player, could still keep that pick if they win the lottery, but it will most likely belong to Presti in the late lottery or middle first round.
That Clipper pick was the subject of much consternation early in the season. While the Thunder were steamrolling the league, the Clippers started the year 6-21, which would have made the unprotected pick they owe to OKC a prime candidate to land near the top. With this draft being considered particularly strong, there was fear that one of the best teams ever could also get another player of franchise changing ability.
Sadly, the Clippers pulled it together and were one of the most middling teams in the league by the end.
1. Playoff Seeding Misfortune
OKC has the best record in the NBA. The good is that whomever they play the rest of the way, they will do so with home court advantage. That was a huge advantage last year when they got to play two game 7s, including in the NBA Finals, in front of a raucous Loud City crowd.
The downside is that until 48 hours before their first playoff game, they will not know who will act as their first round opponent. So, while the Denver Nuggets game plan for the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets spend the week preparing for each other, the Thunder wait. Will it be the Portland Trail Blazers? It might. Could it be the Golden State Warriors? That’s possible. Can the Los Angeles Clippers face the Thunder and push the pick out of the lottery? Very much a chance of that. Will the Phoenix Suns bring their antagonistic defenders to OKC next Sunday? That could happen.
Whoever finally claims that 8th seed, Coach Daigneault and his crew will not know until the wee hours of Friday/Saturday how to prepare.
Assuming the coaching staff can overcome the preparation deficit, the second round would be against the winner of the Lakers/Rockets series. Those two teams were flawed before they were hit with injuries. Barring a run to the Conference Finals spurred by quadragenarian LeBron James, the Lakers will be without elite scorers Luka Doncic and Austin Reeves. Meanwhile, the Rockets lack ball-handling and would need to win four games against OKC’s cavalcade of perimeter defenders using defensive specialist Amen Thompson or shooting specialist Reed Shepard to initiate the offense.
Had it not been for a weird final game of the season in which a Spurs team playing most of their starters lost to a Nuggets team that sat all of their rotation players, the playoff path for the Thunder could have involved playing Denver, a team that gives them fits, and the San Antonio Spurs, who seem to have their kryptonite. Instead, the Thunder will play one of them, max, should they make a run to the NBA Finals.
As a Thunder fan hoping to see another title run, that’s great. As an NBA fan that would love to see some exciting series, that’s a bummer.
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Now, with tongue out of cheek, this has been a fantastic season to watch. SGA will very likely win a second straight MVP. Chet Holmgren is a lock for an all-Defense team and could be all-NBA. Watching Ajay Mitchell become another star caliber player has been exciting, as has been the addition of Jared McCain.
Being an Oklahoma City Thunder fan in this era is a never-ending series of happy moments flavored by minor disappointments that really just remind you of how great we have it, generally. I cannot wait to see them defend their title.
Thunder up!
