I enjoy the Oklahoma City Thunder. I enjoyed the heyday of Kevin Durant. I enjoyed Russell Westbrook’s heroball, king of the city routine in his final three seasons. I enjoyed that, by stepping aggressively into their 2020s rebuild, they were able to ascend more quickly and with finer results than just about anybody. I did not grow up a fan of theirs—after all, they didn’t exist until I was in college—but I became friends with some genuine, aggressive fans of theirs. Although I started following them more closely before their rebuild bore fruit, I still feel like a little bit of a bandwagoner. It’s fine. I don’t consider wanting them to succeed to be a true facet of my identity, but I do still like it.
I think the Thunder are a fun team, but this is admittedly a matter of personal taste. I like that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has an anachronistic mid-range based game that spits in the face of modern analytics if not for how successfully he took those shots. I enjoy their glut of unheralded prospects who have worked their ways into major roles. Their model is a bit reminiscent to me of the San Antonio Spurs, a dominant team that I never found myself disliking—a quiet multi-time MVP that some people seem incapable of classifying as a true superstar, a supporting cast that seemed to arrive out of nowhere, an unselfish and team-focused game controlled by players that seemed to enjoy playing in a small but fiercely loyal market.
That said, I can understand why somebody would root for the San Antonio Spurs over them in the Western Conference Finals. The Thunder just won a title, and while they are far from a dynasty just yet, it is quite common for fans to root for new champions. While Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a great player, arguably the greatest player in the NBA today, there isn’t much “spectacular” in his fundamentally sound, well-rounded two-way game; there is something more novel about Victor Wembanyama, the 7’4 guy with guard skills who blocks a ton of shots and can throw de facto alley-oops to himself off the rim despite the fact that the Thunder employ the best rim-protector in the NBA not named Victor Wembanyama. And while I find national sports media, an overwhelmingly white industry, reserving far more sympathy to Seattle over their lost sports franchise than they ever managed to muster for the far more racially diverse Atlanta, St. Louis, San Diego, Oakland (x2), or Phoenix in more recent years to be extremely suspicious, the actual people of Seattle have a pass to despise Clay Bennett’s NBA team until the day they die, even if Oklahoma City has proven itself to be a more than capable market itself.
What I find off-putting about Oklahoma City Thunder hate is the utter lack of honesty around it. That so much discourse has been consumed by specific catchphrases—the “free throw merchant” and “ethical basketball” tags that were clearly chosen and popularized for virality but have since been adopted in mainstream basketball media as some sort of quasi-academic terms.
Much as political discourse has been swallowed up by dumb catchphrases whose significance is more as an earworm than as a genuine ethos—think “stop the steal”, “build the wall”, or to go back slightly further, “drill baby drill”—simply declaring “free throw merchant” frequently enough is deemed sufficient evidence of something real. For the third consecutive season, the Oklahoma City Thunder finished the 2025-26 regular season having shot a below-average number of free throws. While Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has drawn a higher-than-normal number of free throws, it is both not tops in the NBA (both Luka Doncic and Deni Avdija averaged more free throw attempts per 36 minutes in 2025-26; by Free Throw Rate, he ranked 14th among eligible players) and not especially hard to understand—Shai was second only to Jaylen Brown in 2025-26 at two point attempts per 36 (while fouls on three pointers do happen, they are considerably rarer), and while the signature SGA play is the mid-range jumper, he does still drive to the basket as much as anybody. On a team level, through two games of their series, the San Antonio Spurs have attempted more free throws than the Thunder, with Victor Wembanyama’s total, on fewer two pointers attempted, equaling that of Shai.
The Thunder remind me structurally of the Tim Duncan Spurs, but as a cultural phenomenon, they remind me a little of the Golden State Warriors. The animosity towards them was palpable, but outside of Draymond Green (who was an absolute gentleman relative to his current self), there wasn’t really a tangible reason to dislike them. Stephen Curry, though his style was arguably run into the ground by lesser talents, offered a fascinating re-invention of the sport while being consistently personable off the court. Klay Thompson was basically just the discount version of Steph. Fans were annoyed by Kevin Durant’s departure to Golden State, but his thought process was the logical conclusion of the rings-obsessed basketball culture that had deemed 29 of 30 NBA teams losers every year of his career. I absolutely do not begrudge those who rooted against those Warriors, particularly the Durant-era ones, but that doesn’t mean the Warriors did anything “wrong”.
Fans tend to root for underdogs, and everybody was an underdog relative to those Warriors or these Thunder. But ascribing moral superiority to the underdogs is a recipe for looking absolutely ridiculous in hindsight—I vividly remember the buildup to Super Bowl XXXVI, when the national consensus was rooting for the scrappy, unassailable underdogs, the Bill Belichick and Tom Brady led New England Patriots, over the dynastic, inevitable permanent juggernaut St. Louis Rams. Most of the Patriots bandwagon, of course, abandoned them, but this is the right of the sports fan to root for the underdog, who can only stay an underdog for so long. What becomes embarrassing is when this tendency is faux-intellectualized into some existential crisis for the sport. Because if the fate of the Thunder is a battle for the soul of basketball, the Thunder win, and the sport continues unabated, is that perhaps a sign that you may have taken this a bit too seriously?
I rooted for the Chicago Bulls. I mostly rooted for the San Antonio Spurs. I rooted for the Golden State Warriors at first and then ventured closer to apathy. I rooted against the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics. I mostly rooted against LeBron James. All of these rooting interests were arbitrary. I’m presently rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and while I understand the factors that cause me to do so, none of them make me a morally superior person to those rooting against them. I only ask that those rooting against them recognize the same thing of themselves.
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