Oklahoma City Thunder
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Oklahoma City Thunder, American professional basketball team based in Oklahoma City that plays in the Western Conference of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The franchise was based in Seattle for the first 41 years of its existence, during which, as the Seattle SuperSonics, it won three conference titles (1978, 1979, 1996) and the 1979 NBA championship. The Thunder won the Western Conference title in 2012.
The SuperSonics (named for Seattle’s aerospace industry and usually shortened to “the Sonics”) began play as an NBA expansion team in 1967 and were the first major North American sports franchise based in the Pacific Northwest. Early teams were notable for featuring player-coach Lenny Wilkens, guard Fred (“Downtown Freddie”) Brown, and All-Star center-forward Spencer Haywood, who joined the Sonics in 1971 after winning a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed him to become the first player to join the league before he was four years out of high school. The Sonics did not qualify for the playoffs until the 1974–75 season, when the team, under the guidance of second-year head coach Bill Russell, earned a postseason berth by finishing 43–39 and defeated the Detroit Pistons in a three-game first-round playoff series.
Twenty-two games into the 1977–78 season, Wilkens returned to Seattle to serve as the team’s head coach. He turned around a Sonics team that was 5–17 at the time of his hire and led them to a fourth-place conference finish. In the postseason the Sonics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, the Portland Trail Blazers, and the Denver Nuggets en route to the NBA Finals, where they lost to the Washington Bullets in seven games. The two teams met in the Finals again the following season, with the Sonics—led by guards Dennis Johnson and Gus Williams, as well as center Jack Sikma—winning the rematch in five games to capture the franchise’s first NBA championship. Seattle advanced to the conference finals again in 1979–80 but was eliminated by a Lakers team featuring rookie sensation Magic Johnson.
The 1980s saw the Sonics frequently qualify for the playoffs, with one notable postseason run coming in 1986–87. That season the Sonics limped into the playoffs with a 39–43 record, good for the seventh seed in the Western Conference, but managed to upset the higher-seeded Dallas Mavericks and Houston Rockets en route to another conference finals loss to the Lakers.
George Karl became Seattle’s head coach midway through the 1991–92 season, taking over a high-flying team that starred point guard Gary Payton and power forward Shawn Kemp. In Karl’s first full season at the helm (1992–93), the SuperSonics advanced to a Western Conference finals showdown with the Phoenix Suns, a close seven-game contest that the Suns ultimately won. The following season saw the Sonics register the best record in the NBA during the regular season only to become the first top-seeded team in league history to lose in the first round of the playoffs to an eighth-seeded team (the Denver Nuggets). In 1995–96 the Sonics posted a 64–18 record, the best in the Western Conference that year and at the time the 10th best in NBA history. In the postseason the SuperSonics won their first three playoff series to earn a berth in the NBA Finals, where they met Michael Jordan and the dominant Chicago Bulls (owners of the then best record in NBA history [72–10] that season), who defeated Seattle in a six-game series.
Karl was fired in 1998 after the Sonics followed their NBA Finals run with two consecutive seasons that ended in a second-round playoff loss after the team had won a division title. Seattle then entered into a period of rebuilding in which it qualified for the postseason just twice (both times as a seventh seed) in six seasons. Led by head coach Nate McMillan (who played with the team from 1986 to 1998, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Sonic”) and the deft shooting of Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, the Sonics won a surprising division championship in 2004–05 and advanced to the conference semifinals.
| season | record | playoffs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019–20 | 44–28 | lost in first round | |
| 2020–21 | 22–50 | missed playoffs | |
| 2021–22 | 24–58 | missed playoffs | |
| 2022–23 | 40–42 | missed playoffs | |
| 2023–24 | 57–25 | lost in conference semifinals | |
While the team was struggling in the first years of the 2000s, a number of off-court events took place—including the sale of the Sonics to a group of Oklahoma-based investors and the state and city governments’ refusals to pay for a publicly funded arena—that ultimately led to the franchise’s relocation to Oklahoma City in 2008. The move was made only after the resolution of a lawsuit brought by the city of Seattle, which resulted in its retaining the rights to the Sonics’ name and history in the event that another NBA franchise begins play in the city.
The team, renamed the Oklahoma City Thunder, quickly rebuilt, and, behind the standout play of forward Kevin Durant and guard Russell Westbrook, the Thunder qualified for the playoffs in their second season in Oklahoma City. The team’s rapid ascent resulted in Oklahoma City’s advancing to the Western Conference finals in both 2010–11 and 2013–14 and to the NBA Finals in 2011–12. The team returned to the conference finals in 2015–16 and took a 3–1 series lead over the Golden State Warriors (who had won an NBA-record 73 games during the regular season) before ultimately being eliminated by the Warriors in seven games.
Durant surprisingly left Oklahoma City for the Warriors in the following offseason, and the Thunder then rebuilt around Westbrook. While he made NBA history by averaging a triple-double and setting the league record for most triple-double games in a season (42) in 2016–17, the team did not have enough great complementary players, and its season ended with a first-round playoff exit. The team added star wing Paul George before the 2017–18 season, and Westbrook averaged another triple-double that campaign, but the one-dimensional Thunder again failed to advance past the first round in the following playoffs. Despite Westbrook’s third straight season averaging a triple-double and George breaking out as one of the NBA’s best players in 2018–19, the Thunder again disappointed in the postseason with a first-round loss.
Oklahoma City traded Westbrook and George in the 2019 offseason but were surprisingly competitive in the following season, winning 44 games and making the playoffs. A true rebuild began in 2021–21, as the team bottomed out to a 22–50 record. Over the next several years, the team focused on acquiring draft picks and developing younger players. The strategy began to pay off in 2022–23, as 24-year-old point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who the Thunder had received in the George trade, had a breakout season, earning All-NBA first team and All-Star honors. Oklahoma City exceeded expectations even further the following year by finishing 57–25 and topping its division. Led by Gilgeous-Alexander and rising power forward Jalen Williams and center Chet Holmgren, the Thunder advanced as far as the second round of the playoffs, the team’s best finish since 2015–16.