IT took a dream run for the ages to win Oklahoma City its first major pro sports championship.
Headlined by NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder won the 2024-25 title in a riveting seven-game series over the Indiana Pacers just three months ago.
Before OKC’s title defense went underway, one of its key cogs in Isaiah Joe paid a visit to the Philippines and talked all things Thunder.
Apart from their silent-but-deadly starpower, the world champions quietly built a tight-knit brotherhood away from the limelight that made them an under-the-radar force that put the league on notice.
“We just have good people. When you’re surrounded with good people, you naturally click, you naturally create that brotherhood and bond. From the moment I touched down in OKC, I realized that,” Joe said.
“It’s helped us on the court because we do everything together — we go to team dinners, we throw events. Whenever we get on the court, it just helps us jell every day.”
Then came one of the best regular season runs in recent memory that matched their franchise-best 68-14 record back in the 1995-96 season as the Seattle SuperSonics.
A runner-up finish in the in-season NBA Cup, among many major breakthroughs that year, proved to be the first warning shots Oklahoma City fired in terms of solidifying their championship aspirations.
And it took playing each one of those 82 games as if their entire season was on the line.
"Last season, throughout every game, we had to act as if we were being hunted, desperate and playing with a certain sense of urgency. We had to understand that every team was gonna go all out on us and we had to turn that into us being title hunters,” the 26-year-old guard said.
“At the start of the season, we just had to overcome a lot of adversity. We had to understand that we’re a really good team and we’re gonna get a lot of the guys the best shots.”
Thunder in the playoffs
Come the playoffs, OKC outgunned Ja Morant-manned Memphis in a first-round sweep along with a five-game Western Conference Finals rout of Anthony Edwards-led Minnesota.
But the toughest part of that playoff run, one that goes without saying, is a pulsating pair of Game 7s in the conference semifinals against Denver and eventually in the finals past Indiana.
As the old sporting cliché goes, the Thunder found a way to peak at the best time in a fabled championship run.
“We had to keep going each and every game, win or lose. In the playoffs, we had to dig deep in a couple of Game 7s to advance one time and then one to win the championship,” Joe said.
“We’re a group of guys that just got stronger and stronger over the course of the season and that helped us in the playoffs.”
Now with Larry O’Brien raised, rings worn, and a banner immortalized, the time has come for the Thunder to hit the reset button.
Past is past, for sure, but Joe acknowledged the need to keep part of that championship magic in their minds, as they run it all back this year in a bid to become the first repeat NBA champions in seven years.
“We have to be hungry, hungrier even than we were last season, and understand that there’s a bigger target on our backs,” Joe said.
“Nobody wants us to repeat so we’ll have a ‘back to zero’ mindset that none of these that happened in the past carries over. Everything’s new and it’s a clean slate. Once we start fresh like that and have a clean mindset, the same that we had last year that we built each and every game, it’ll help us.”
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