The NBA Executive Who Can See the Future—and Built One of the Best Teams in History

Wall Street Journal

2 days ago

The NBA is built for the Oklahoma City Thunder to lose.
In a league historically dominated by glamour teams from big cities on both coasts, the Thunder make their home in the middle of flyover country. When the NBA's biggest stars decide where to play, they never choose one of the league's smallest markets—situated right in the middle of tornado alley.
But this season, the Thunder are more than just the favorites to win the NBA championship. They have become one of the most dominant collections of talent ever to step on a basketball court.
That's because the Thunder have one crucial advantage over the league's other 29 teams: an executive whose superpower just happens to be building superteams the hard way.
For the entire time the team has been in Oklahoma City, general manager Sam Presti has been the mastermind behind the Thunder. In that time, he built a title contender and tore it down. Now he's built an even better team.
And he's done it all with one hand tied behind his back. In the NBA, a marquee free agent can swing the fortunes of an entire team. But Oklahoma City has never been able to land a free agent who has made even a single All-Star team. Instead, Presti tends to acquire players by drafting or trading for them.
Which means the Thunder depend on his ability to predict basketball's future by identifying the undervalued players who will become stars down the line.
'In order to be exceptional,' Presti says of the Thunder's strategy, 'you have to be willing to be an exception.'
In nearly every player on the Thunder's roster, you can see Presti's predictive gifts at work. The Thunder traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander after a rookie season in which he barely averaged 10 points a game; he blossomed into the league's leading scorer and MVP. Presti nabbed another All-Star with a middle-of-the-pack draft pick, and built basketball's most fearsome defense around a 31-year-old journeyman who has never made a single All-Star team.
'All teams do great diligence,' said Bill Duffy, agent of the Thunder's Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, who transformed quickly from Presti draft picks to ascendant stars. 'But with him it's a premium metric. It's the highest level.'
The astonishing thing is that this year's Thunder—who walloped opponents by 12.9 points per game this season, the most dominant margin in NBA history—hardly mark the first time Presti has gazed into his crystal basketball.
After a playing career at Emerson College, where he once took a team-record six charges in a game, Presti began his NBA career as an intern with the San Antonio Spurs in 2000. There, he helped convince the organization to draft Tony Parker—a little-known point guard from faraway France who would go on to win four championships and land in the Hall of Fame.
'If you knew Sam early, there was no question of how successful he would be,' said P.J. Carlesimo, an assistant coach with the Spurs at the time. 'He understood how all the parts of a team fit together.'
The Seattle SuperSonics hired Presti away in 2007, making the then-29-year-old the second-youngest general manager in NBA history. In Seattle, and when the franchise moved to Oklahoma City a year later, Presti embarked on perhaps the greatest run of success the NBA draft has ever seen, selecting Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden in consecutive years in the late 2000s. None of those three was a No. 1 overall pick. All of them would go on to win league MVP.
Part of Presti's ability to build a team comes from the fact that there is seemingly nothing in the world he can't become obsessed with—and draw a basketball lesson from.
He cites the biographer Robert Caro as an inspiration for how to do the slow, painstaking work required to maximize a roster. And when Presti considers how players gel, he's as likely to think about '70s electronic music as he is the '70s Celtics. He once said that a basketball team doesn't evolve as rigidly as a song from the German band Kraftwerk. 'And I like Kraftwerk, to be clear,' Presti insisted. 'I think they're hugely, hugely important to modern music.'
Presti doesn't claim to know exactly how his trades and picks will work out, but Thunder coach Mark Daigneault says that an optimistic outlook is a key ingredient of Presti's magic.
'If a player has strengths and flaws, he sees the best in them,' Daigneault said. 'He's not a skeptic. He sees them for what they can bring to a team.'
Presti's glass-half-full outlook helped a few years ago, when he made perhaps the boldest gamble of his life. He had already built one NBA Finals team in Oklahoma City around Durant and Westbrook. They were still a solid playoff team with Westbrook after Durant left the Thunder in 2016. But Presti saw a future he didn't like: a team that was good but not truly great, stalled out just short of the promised land.
So he traded Westbrook and co-star Paul George in exchange for an astonishing haul of draft picks: seven extra first-rounders over five years. Armed with a currency he can spend as well as anyone alive, he set about rebuilding the Thunder from the ground up.
'In saying goodbye to the past,' Presti wrote in an opinion piece in The Oklahoman explaining the moves, 'we have begun to chart our future.'
That future has arrived with astonishing speed. Without the big-city appeal of the Lakers or Warriors, small-market teams can spend decades languishing in the NBA wilderness. But only six years after trading away the last of the Durant, Westbrook and Harden core, the Thunder are back in the Finals with a whole new cast of players.
They're the heavy favorite to bring Oklahoma City its first championship, but the scariest thing about the Thunder for the rest of the NBA is that they might just be getting started. The core of this team is built to last, while Presti will have multiple first-round picks in each of the next two drafts.
That means another star is almost certain to call Oklahoma City home. It's just that nobody knows who he is—not even Presti.
Write to Robert O'Connell at [e-mail]