With Thunder on top, NBA's ‘wide-open' Western Conference is a thing of the past

New York Times

9 hours ago

Is it parity? Or is it parity plus one?
That's my question after watching the Oklahoma City Thunder this season, and it has important implications for everyone else in the Western Conference.
We've entered the NBA's parity era, supposedly, with the Thunder being the NBA's seventh different champion in the past seven years. In fact, none of the past six defending champions has even made it past the second round a year later; 11 of the 12 finalists have failed to do the same. Of the past 24 conference finalists, only Boston (2022-23), Miami (2022-23), Minnesota (2024-25) and Indiana (2024-25) have made it back the next year.
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With forces like the collective bargaining agreement's tax aprons and a toxic repeater penalty at work, and the cycle of teams going 'all-in' with draft capital for short title windows, that pattern figures to stay largely intact … with one glaring exception.
That exception is the Thunder, who are reigning champions after a dominant 68-win regular season and a 16-7 blitz through the playoffs and appear to be at the beginning of a lengthy stint atop the league's food chain. They will open next season with a 27-year-old MVP and a 24-year-old All-Star. They have a 'redshirt year' lottery pick coming onto next year's roster, six first-round picks in the next two drafts and an innumerable stockpile of future seconds. Every single player on this year's championship team is under contract for next season, and the team is below the luxury-tax line. Every key player except Alex Caruso is 27 or younger.
So, yeah, I'd say they're in good shape. And that's before you talk about all the moves they've hit on the margins lately. It has to be maddening for rival front offices to see an already stacked Thunder team trade for Caruso without giving a single draft pick or find Ajay Mitchell in the second round of the draft.
Eventually, some of the forces that dragged down other champions may get to Oklahoma City. Stars Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren will need new contracts. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander might not maintain such an exalted level of play. Rivals will poach talent as the aprons close in. Health, always a postseason X-factor, is never guaranteed.
And inevitably, things sometimes don't work out like we think: Witness the last time we were in Oklahoma City for the finals in 2012. We thought we'd be coming back every year to see Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; instead, it took 13 years to return.
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Maybe that happens again with the Thunder, and I'm writing about some out-of-nowhere finalists next June. But in terms of being built to last, this iteration of the Thunder looks as iron-clad as any defending champion since the 1991 Chicago Bulls. We could easily be looking at a half-decade run where the other three conference finalists rotate out every year, but it's Oklahoma City five times in a row.
So … imagine being one of the other 14 teams in the West. How on Earth are you supposed to beat these guys? Reminder: The Thunder won the conference by 16 games in 2024-25 and still may not have come into the best version of themselves.
The entire logic of team-building in the West for the last half-decade has been that 'it's wide open.' Get yourself to a win total in the low-to-mid 50s, and then anything can happen in the playoffs. Veteran teams with title experience, like the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors, could talk themselves into being contenders with a middling playoff seed as long as there wasn't a scary, dominant team in the conference that required a higher level. That's been the case the last few seasons, as the previous three Western Conference finalists before the Thunder won 53, 53 and 50 regular-season games, respectively.
Now, that entire logic is flipped upside down; it's definitely not wide open, unless your desired endgame is losing in five in the conference finals. For those who aspire for more, it's either get to the Thunder's level or go home. What does a higher bar do to change the logic in an already cutthroat conference?
We've already, perhaps, seen some of the answers, as teams adjust to the idea that it probably takes a 60-win-caliber team to realistically hang with Oklahoma City in a playoff series. A 50-win Denver team and a 48-win Memphis team fired their coaches in the final weeks of the season; Memphis then traded Desmond Bane for four first-round picks in a bid to remix a core that wasn't going to be good enough in the Age of Thunder. The Houston Rockets, meanwhile, bravely went the other way, pushing some chips in on a young team to acquire Kevin Durant after a first-round playoff defeat.
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While this is a bit of a conundrum for older, short-window teams like the Lakers, Warriors, Clippers and Nuggets, they're at a point where their hands are tied. The Thunder's awesomeness is more likely to complicate future decisions about whether to stay all-in than present ones about maxing out what they have.
Where it's more of a potential confounding factor is for those still on the rise, or mid-build teams like Memphis. For instance, Houston and the San Antonio Spurs have as much promise for the next half decade as any team in either conference besides the Thunder, but they may now be looking at different strategies to build a roster at the Thunder's level; even after acquiring Durant, the Rockets feel like they're one move away from being on Oklahoma City's level. In a related story, they still can trade five future first-round picks. Meanwhile, ought-to-be-rebuilding teams like the Dallas Mavericks and Portland Trail Blazers should be looking at the future landscape with similar thoughts in mind. With that, those teams still in their building stages might also be looking at how they specifically match up with the Thunder and what advantages they could take into a playoff series.
If there's one possible kernel of an answer to the 'How do you beat these guys?' question, it's this one: have a giant forward who can handle. Somebody who can play on the ball but is so big, strong and solid in his decisions that the swarms of Thunder defenders are a mere nuisance. The Thunder don't have a true power forward on their roster, which makes big, powerful players who can handle while facing the basket the closest thing to their kryptonite.
There are just not that many of these guys on the planet. Only two players have truly given Oklahoma City trouble over the past two seasons: Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Dončić. (If you're wondering about Denver and Nikola Jokić, the Nuggets struggled against OKC's defense in their seven-game second-round series, allowing 74 Thunder steals in seven games and posting a 15.1 percent turnover rate.)
Maybe another player can play his way onto the list (Cooper Flagg, anyone?), but right now, that is the list. It makes sense that a lesser version of the same archetype — Indiana's Pascal Siakam — was such a nuisance for the Thunder in the finals. He alternated between torturing the Thunder bigs on the perimeter and tormenting their smalls in the paint.
Even that area of vulnerability may be shrinking; relative to the 2024 Dallas series that Dončić dominated, the Thunder added size in Isaiah Hartenstein and a plus defender against bigger forwards in Caruso. Oklahoma City also still has the flexibility to go out and add a player in that archetype if needed; Gordon Hayward wasn't it, but an overflowing asset chest and a roster of tradable contracts would easily let the Thunder try again. (To provide hypothetical examples, they could trade Ousmane Dieng, Isaiah Joe and both their 2025 firsts to Portland for Deni Avdija or to Brooklyn for Cam Johnson.)
Maybe some team out there is building a new mousetrap that will ultimately confound even the Thunder. Could Victor Wembanyama be an ultimate cheat code if he has enough help? Could the Rockets assemble enough grimy athleticism and physicality around Durant to outlast them in 84-83 wrestling matches? Could the Lakers put enough around Luka that he's once again a problem for the Thunder? Is there a Giannis trade to the West that changes everything?
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Without those questions answered, the road map for the next few years is clear. As tough as the rest of the West looks, there's a two-level hierarchy in the conference: It's the Thunder, then a big chasm, then everyone else. For 14 other teams, the maddening part of the puzzle is trying to figure out how to close that gap while the Thunder still have all the advantages in draft picks, youth, cap flexibility and, most importantly, talent.
Good luck, everyone, but I do have one final, desperate suggestion: expansion. If it happens and the NBA adds teams in Seattle and Las Vegas, one of you gets to move to the East.
(Top photo of Oklahoma City Thunder: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)