Are the Thunder even better this season? Breaking down OKC's undefeated start

The start of the NBA season has been marked, in large part, by change and surprise. The Houston Rockets, a defense-first Goliath that entered the season without a starting point guard, own the league’s most efficient offense. The Miami Heat, bottom five in pace for more than a half-decade, are suddenly the fastest show on hardwood. The top two teams in the Eastern Conference are the Philadelphia 76ers, who have Joel Embiid playing 22 minutes a night, and the Chicago Bulls, who hadn’t opened a season with five straight wins since before The Last Dance.

For all that change and surprise, though, one thing, at least, has remained constant: The Oklahoma City Thunder still look like they’re better than … well, everybody.

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After a 137-106 Sunday shellacking of the woebegone New Orleans Pelicans, the Thunder sit atop the Western Conference at 7-0 — the last undefeated team in the NBA. As they begin a four-game West Coast road trip in Los Angeles on Tuesday against the Clippers, they own the NBA’s best net rating, according to NBA Advanced Stats, just ahead of the Rockets, whom they beat on opening night.

Oklahoma City is just the third team in NBA history to open consecutive seasons 7-0, joining the Boston Celtics, who did it in 1963-64 and ’64-65, and the Rockets, who did it in 1993-94 and ’94-95; those Celtics and Rockets teams both won back-to-back titles. The Thunder have won these first seven games by an average of 12.43 points per contest — just off the pace of last season’s 12.87, which was the largest average margin of victory ever. On the heels of an utterly dominant 68-win regular season, the Thunder currently have the non-garbage-time point differential of … a 69-win team.

(Stefan Milic/Yahoo Sports Illustration)

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which this is not a surprise. OKC returned 95% of the minutes (and 99% of the postseason minutes) from last year’s title-winner. In the annual NBA GM Survey, 80% of the league’s top decision-makers picked the Thunder to become the first team since the Kevin Durant-era Warriors to repeat as champions. I am not an NBA general manager — thank heaven for small mercies, Fans of Teams I Do Not Run — but I agreed with that sentiment. The Thunder were the heavy favorite for many completely understandable reasons; them being good is not, strictly speaking, news.

And yet:

The NBA, as you’ve likely heard, is living through an era of engineered unprecedented parity, with a different champion every year since 2018. Combine that with the broader context of a league in which regression tends to be the rule — 25 of the 26 previous teams to win 64 or more games have dropped off the next season, according to ESPN’s Zach Kram — and the team that was the best wire-to-wire last season still looking like the league’s best … is actually pretty surprising?

Especially when you consider that Jalen Williams — OKC’s All-Star, All-NBA, All-Defensive Swiss army knife of a No. 2 option — still hasn’t played a second this season as he continues to work his way back from offseason wrist surgery.

And that after getting off to a sensational start, averaging 23 points, 10.3 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 2.6 steals-plus-blocks per game on 57/42/86 shooting splits …

… Chet Holmgren has missed the last three games with lower back soreness. Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said the team is “being conservative” with the rising star big man — the kind of sober, longest-view-in-the-room approach you can take when:

You just won the NBA championship despite Holmgren missing 50 games;
You have Isaiah Hartenstein available to start at center, and all he’s doing is averaging a double-double with 3.6 assists per game while shooting 63% from the floor and holding opponents to 53.8% shooting at the rim;
You just won the NBA championship despite Hartenstein missing 25 games;
You have Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Whatever else changes in OKC, everything still starts with SGA, the Western Conference Player of the Week, whose encore to one of the greatest individual seasons in league history — All-Star, scoring title, All-NBA First Team, Most Valuable Player, Western Conference finals MVP, Finals MVP and the NBA championship — is off to a pretty fantastic start:

Thanks partly to a double-overtime double-nickel in an NBA Finals rematch against the Pacers, Gilgeous-Alexander is topping last season’s league-leading scoring mark, averaging 33.6 points, 5.1 rebounds and 5.9 assists in 36 minutes per game. He’s on pace for a third straight season of 30-5-5 on 50% shooting — more than any player save for Michael Jordan and Giannis Antetokounmpo — and has balanced out a rough start from long distance (just 26.8% from 3-point range on nearly six attempts a night) by shooting a blistering 61.7% on 2-point shots, with career-best marks finishing at the rim, from floater range and on his patented midrange pull-ups.

SGA remains the NBA’s preeminent source of dribble penetration, averaging a league-high 20.3 drives to the basket per game — the north-south engine of a Thunder offense that ranks eighth in points scored per possession despite a frigid overall start from 3-point land. He remains one of the game’s most devastating late-game offensive options, with twice as many points (46) when the score’s within five points in the final five minutes as the second-leading “clutch” scorer (Tyrese Maxey, 23).

He remains one of the league’s most efficient high-volume scorers, one of just nine players to maintain a true shooting percentage (which factors in 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy) north of .600 while using more than 30% of his team’s offensive possessions. He remains one of the steadiest pairs of hands in the business, too, with the second-lowest turnover rate among those nine high-usage players. (Leading that list: Lauri Markkanen, who has coughed it up on a hilarious 3.7% of his offensive plays.)

He remains a model of metronomic consistency, ringing up 30 points in six of OKC’s first seven games — and doing it in three quarters in wins over Washington and New Orleans, sitting out the entire fourth quarter of both blowout victories. He’s now scored 20 or more in 79 consecutive games; according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes, that ties Oscar Robertson “for the third-longest such streak in NBA history, trailing only Wilt Chamberlain (126 and 92 games).”

He just … remains. Whatever the Thunder need, whenever they need it, Gilgeous-Alexander is there to provide; his presence on the court, perpetually locked in, virtually guarantees their continued presence among the NBA’s elite.

“All of the guys that I study, idolize, and look up to, and strive to get to that [championship] level, have done it multiple, multiple and multiple of times,” Gilgeous-Alexander said during the preseason. “There is still a lot more work to be done.”

Gilgeous-Alexander’s the one with the most hardware on his mantel, but he’s not doing that work alone. The second-largest part of OKC’s championship formula — one of the best defenses we’ve ever seen — is still here, too.

Entering Tuesday’s action, the Thunder — again — lead the NBA in defensive efficiency … and by, like, a lot. They’ve allowed 105.3 points per 100 possessions outside of garbage time, according to Cleaning the Glass; that’s 3.6 points-per-100 stingier than the second-ranked defense in the NBA, the Victor Wembanyama-led San Antonio Spurs. The gap between OKC and San Antonio is as large as the gap between the Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks, who rank eighth.

The Thunder sit second in the league in steals, fifth in deflections, seventh in blocks, first in charges drawn and second in shots contested. They continue to rank among the league’s best teams at limiting shot attempts at the rim, getting back in transition and forcing opponents to play against a set half-court defense. All-Defensive stopper Luguentz Dort continues to subject the toughest covers the league has to offer to his physical and athletic brand of ball-hawking; Cason Wallace has opened the season by making a compelling case to join him, leading the NBA in steals and sitting seventh in deflections while checking opponents of all shapes and sizes.

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And when Daigneault’s missing an ingredient, he has the good fortune of being able to turn to a pantry that Sam Presti has stocked like it’s an episode of “Chopped” in search of a substitute. Down two starters? Just start Wallace and double up on how much Aaron Wiggins you were planning to use. Floor getting a little congested, thanks to one too many defense-first shaky shooters? Good news: We just re-stocked Isaiah Joe, so he can return from missing five games with a left knee contusion and promptly make eight 3-pointers in his first two games back.

Expected rotation getting a little thin now that you’ve bumped the sixth, seventh and eighth men up in the pecking order? Don’t fret: Turns out that Ajay Mitchell, last year’s second-round pick out of UC Santa Barbara, who played all of 681 total minutes as a rookie, can just scale up to being your third leading scorer and assist man, looking like a friggin’ Sixth Man of the Year candidate in 28 minutes per night. NBD.

“He’s just relentless with it,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of Mitchell after Sunday’s win over the Pelicans. “No matter who’s in front of him, no matter the coverage, he does a really good job of touching the paint and then making plays from there, whether it’s for himself or for his teammates. I’ve said this many times about Ajay: His feel for the game is what jumps out the most. He has natural touch, natural feel, and it’s hard to teach those things.”

SGA’s scouting report on Mitchell might as well double for a read on the Thunder writ large: a relentless collection of players capable of performing, no matter who’s in the game or who’s opposing them. Presti stocks the cupboard with players teeming with the kind of traits that are hard to teach or replicate. Daigneault amplifies their gifts tactically while also establishing a culture of maturity, humility and persistence. They hit the court and ball out, free and clear, playing with the kind of confidence that comes with knowing that, if you fall, you’ve got the MVP as your safety net.

The Thunder’s unbeaten streak won’t last forever — this Clippers-Trail Blazers road back-to-back is tough — but that’s a recipe that produces a hell of a lot more wins than losses. It’s also a recipe for being better today than you were yesterday … even if yesterday you were the best team in the world.

“It feels like we’re a better team,” Gilgeous-Alexander said Sunday. “It feels like we’ve had a year to get better, honestly … since the start of last year, we’ve had a year to get better, play together, learn each other, on and off the court, and it feels like we’ve had a head start in that this season.”

Keeping pace with the Thunder wasn’t exactly easy before. Catching up with them when they’ve got a head start sounds downright miserable. Doing it when they’re at full strength — when Williams and Holmgren are back, when they’re not 28th in 3-point percentage as a team, which feels like the only unsustainable thing about their start — sounds damn near impossible.

“Obviously, we’re dealing with some injuries to start the year, but because we’ve gotten better, one through 15, the guys in the locker room, we’re able to plug and play and figure it out on the fly, and still have good results,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Yeah. We’re definitely a better team than we were a year ago.”

Which makes Oklahoma City an awfully frightening monster to deal with. No change or surprise there.