Kevin Durant has been back to play at Oklahoma City many times since he left the Thunder in 2016, but this time felt a little different. With his newest, fifth franchise, the Houston Rockets, he came home to a fanbase that feels even more emboldened than usual to air their grievances with him. As of this past June, the Thunder are champions. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s version of the team is outfitted with relentless athletes all sacrificing their individuality for the cause of an ant-colony swarm that takes unusual advantage of its youth—and it has done what KD’s Thunder never could.
So Kevin had that to reflect on. And he had two old Thunder teammates with him, as he got booed every time he touched the ball: Steven Adams and Jeff Green. Only Adams really plays, among those two, and all three are old NBA men, now, facing down a generation of fans that never saw them in the blue-and-white. Surrounding them in Houston is a core of talent as fresh and tantalizing as OKC’s, and with coach Ime Udoka, it is their task to guide these youngsters to providence. It is the Thunder’s objective, at the start of the 2025-26 campaign, to re-prove that they don’t need the help of imported star veterans to come out on top.
What was one of the best rivalries in the league last season, in other words, looks to be even more interesting as a new one begins. Tuesday night’s season opener between the two teams resulted in a 125-124 Thunder victory, earned the hard way through two overtimes. SGA had 35, including most of OKC's crunchtime scoring, and a decisive two free-throws after he danced Durant out of balance, and fouled him out of the game. Though big, and metaphoric in an honest way, the moment didn’t crystallize everything about the game: a complex, sprawling basketball system, set to unfold two more wonderful times before Spring.
Questions about Houston’s strength at point guard, for starters, will only be louder after this one. They had a playmaker-by-committee flow in the contest, with five players notching three assists or more. The easy baskets weren’t consistently there, though—they relied too much on ballsy shotmaking, and on the second chances that their elite rebounding crew provided (Adams, Durant, and Alperen Sengun combined for 33, and the Rockets out-glassed the Thunder by a dozen). But perhaps more damaging than the loss of easy flow without a true one-guard, in the wake of Fred VanVleet’s season-ending injury, was the lost ball security.
OKC turned the Rockets over 21 times, seizing on the higher-up, less-tested dribbles of all of the above, and also of Amen Thompson. Per usual, Thompson was an aesthetic marvel, utilizing his singular Olympic-track athleticism to score at the rack in unusually romantic ways, and he did show a lot of vision as a primary ball-handler as well. But he simply isn’t used to this amount of pressure on his handle, and he gave it away four times on the way to a -11 net rating in the loss. It was Sengun, in the end, and not Thompson who showed out as Houston’s best young player and best player, full-stop.
The 23-year-old Turkish big man scored 39 points, keyed by his newfound shooting range with five three-pointers made out of eight taken—last season, he never took more than three in any game, and even that was rare. For one of the best post-scorers around to step out like this will have huge implications for the Rockets offense, and could lift Sengun into MVP-contention territory. But he’s no point guard. The Rockets will need to figure that one out over the course of the season, and their answer looks to include more Reed Sheppard; a second-year dynamo who looked shell-shocked and nervous against OKC, but who could still get himself and others makeable shots nonetheless, and do so without too much ball leakage.
Of course, taking care of the ball against the Thunder is different than taking care of it against anyone else. Getting the rock away from opponents is the biggest reason OKC became champions, and if they’re to repeat, it will likely be the key again. In their opener, they looked a bit less frenzy-inducing than we’re used to seeing them, at first, but in the second half they got to blitzing again, led by Alex Caruso’s signature physicality and Cason Wallace’s four long-armed takeaways. The big OKC question is just how willing a fully proven team is to keep on throwing their whole bodies into every defensive possession, over 81 more games.
The first games of any NBA season don't have these sorts of answers, and produce far more questions. They're never the sport's most precise or streamlined outputs, either, but they don’t need to be if the drama is there, and in this case it surely was. The Thunder and Rockets have regional beef, are both oozing with explosive athleticism, are both title contenders, and now have the framework of Durant’s melodrama—and the sharpness of SGA's counternarrative—to further heighten their fascinating rivalry in 2025-26. They won’t meet again until 2026, when prolonged attention to both will have sustained many a basketball lover’s time, and brought them both to a satisfying next chapter.