For an NBA team to become a League Pass Darling means that they have entered a transitional space. This is the realm between exciting developmental project and true contention. It is a proving ground familiar only to the truest of fans; people who hit play on every Zach Lowe podcast within an hour of its release, bodies tense as they wait for approval of their hoops preferences, or for the potent gossip that may re-shape them. Through this thresher, last year, went the Oklahoma City Thunder.
You can’t stay here forever, or even for very long. League Pass celebrity is a fence you sit on for one season, usually, but two at most. From there you either go back to anonymity, or into the primetime. From all angles, it would appear that the Thunder have gotten off into the greener side of the barrier, ready to prance as a bona fide championship striver. A second-round knockout in the most recent playoffs, the Thunder will grow from their defeat but have also added both experience and depth externally. Josh Giddey, a 21-year-old in need of more shaping than OKC now has time to facilitate, is gone; in his place, Alex Caruso, who joins free agent signing Isaiah Hartenstein to give the team even more defensive mettle.
Caruso gives OKC more of what they already had: resistance, versatility, relentlessness, intelligence. The same is true for Hartenstein, but he also provides something they didn’t have, which is girth in the paint. The Thunder were in the lower third of team rebounding last year, and near the bottom of playoff performance in the category. To an extent, this was by design. They boast switchable lineups capable of uptempo ball, and they were willing to sacrifice rebounding margins to murder you in several other areas. But it’s also the case that Chet Holmgren, heading into his second year, is a very skinny guy. “I think he needs to be a little fatter, to be honest,” Nikola Jokic said of Holmgren during his rookie season.
Since both Holmgren and Hartenstein can shoot from deep, and since both can guard multiple positions, the Thunder can now play two qualified centers together, both of whom were among the best defenders in the sport last season. It’s not going to be nice for opposing offenses. And on the other side, Hartenstein can bring the pain on screens for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, freeing Holmgren up to explore more of his potential as a super-tall ball handler with a deep scoring bag.
Caruso, much of the time, won’t be around for these actions. He’s missed an average of about twenty games per season for a while now, playing less than thirty minutes in those. And this is probably more than he would’ve seen the floor, if he were on a better team. The Chicago Bulls, clawing their way just out of the basement and into play-in purgatory, relied heavily on a frequently hampered Caruso. And it makes sense that they did, because he’s one of the best closers in the game, seemingly compiling a nightly mental report for the first 40 minutes before executing its findings in the final eight, taking the ball away from the other team with ease.
The Thunder are good enough without Caruso that they’ll enable him to apply this strategic framework to the brutal run that is 82 games followed by two months of do-or-die playoff basketball. He can stay on ice and preserve his red-eyed defensive instincts, rough on the body to enact, most of the season. He can be their Mariano Rivera, never over-tasked or over-burdened. It is, really, a perfect fit. And should Caruso look elsewhere when his contract expires after the season, he will have been an appropriate tutor to Gilgeous-Alexander and Cason Wallace—already excellent and promising point-of-attack defenders, respectively, who can elevate to yet another level in the Caruso dojo.
Even more important than OKC’s veteran pick-ups, though, is the long-term planning that’s been going on. Holmgren is due to explode into All-Star territory, a domain that Jalen Williams was just shy of last year, his second season. Wallace, too, has room to grow after a tantalizing rookie campaign. And should any of their growing talent get too expensive, the Thunder have Nikola Topic resting for a season with a torn ACL after they selected him at No. 12 overall in the 2024 NBA Draft. Projected as a top-three pick for much of the past year, Topic sank after getting hurt, but the Thunder know as well as any franchise that today’s reclamation project is tomorrow’s saving grace (Gilgeous-Alexander, once merely a promising prospect in the Paul George trade, is now an MVP candidate).
In a newly restrictive NBA that more or less punishes teams for being good, there is no way forward into consistent contention without perennial youth development. The Thunder are young as hell right now, and already as good as anyone, but their clock is also already ticking. Soon, they will still be young, both biologically and spiritually, but the financial realities of their profession will saddle their ascendant players with numbers that evoke the struggle of middle age. Their general manager Sam Presti has been here before. Remember when Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden were all on the same team?
If you follow this team at all, this column is hardly the first place you’ve seen their current young core compared to that one, taken apart more than a decade ago. Presti is, one would think, ready for the complications ahead, in a landscape even more onerous than the one in which he traded Harden away. That’s why, in addition to continually adding through the draft, he’s also been unforgiving on the trade market. Right now, OKC still owns several upcoming first-round draft picks they acquired from other teams—a ridiculously plush circumstance for a squad that could absolutely win the 2025 NBA championship. So yes, it’s going to be a good year for the Thunder. Potentially their best ever. But it also looks very much like it’s going to be a good decade.
