Tim KeownMay 13, 2026, 08:30 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Follow on XMultiple Authors
SGA drops 35 points to help Thunder sweep Lakers (0:55)Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drops 35 points in the Thunder’s 115-110 Game 4 win over the Lakers. (0:55)
EACH BASKETBALL IS perfectly aligned on each rack in the Oklahoma City Thunder’s practice facility, one continuous WilsonWilsonWilsonWilson shelf after shelf. The water bottles and sports drinks in the refrigerators are aligned with the same precision, label out, so straight you can imagine someone standing before them, one eye nearly closed, assessing each one as if judging its moral rectitude.
But the sweat towels hit the hardest. The towels are where metaphor begins to blur and a mission statement comes into focus. Each towel has eight blue stripes along one side, and each towel is folded identically and stacked on a shelf with those eight blue stripes lined up like battle-ready battalions. Their utility is so pragmatic and yet the display speaks to something far more important.
The NBA champion Thunder, under general manager and interior designer Sam Presti, are attempting to create a system where function follows form, and success is the natural byproduct of its environment. The Thunder are, in more ways than one, the team of our moment. The world outside is unpredictable, tenuous, fraught. The ground shifts without warning. Truth has become subjective, reality distorted, the next hellish turn never more than an unlocked phone screen away.
This hypnotic consistency, an extreme rendition of “control what you can control,” is central to the Thunder’s quest to become the first team since the 2017-18 Warriors to repeat as champions. The Thunder have swept the Suns and the Lakers in the first two rounds of the playoffs, and they enter the Western Conference finals as favorites to bring another parade to the wide and mostly quiet streets of downtown Oklahoma City.
Is it possible to create the perfect basketball ecosystem? If you line everything up just right, personalities and talents and towels and basketballs, will the product on the court inevitably become as pure and consistent as its surroundings?
“There are all kinds of constraints,” coach Mark Daigneault says. “There’s a constraint on minutes, there’s a constraint on roster spots, there’s a constraint with the salary cap. They know I only have so many minutes. They know I can only start five guys. They’re smart; they get it. But there’s no constraint on the investment you can make when they come in the building every day and making sure you deliver a first-class experience to every single player every single day.”
“We have a locker room that’s not only full of good guys, but guys you want to be around,” Holmgren says.
“My favorite part is watching him handle it,” Daigneault says. “He’s unflappable. It doesn’t bother him. He puts it in its proper place by framing it as something that comes with the territory of being great.”
It was the kind of move that Gilgeous-Alexander performs as a matter of routine. It was the kind of move that calls to mind the Bruce Lee dictum, “Be like water making its way through cracks.” It was the kind of move that makes it hard to decide what is more impressive: that a mind could think it, or that a body could perform it.
“People don’t actually know what they’re watching with Shai,” Jalen Williams says. “They just see numbers and don’t understand the experience. I wish everyone could sit courtside once in their life just to watch what he does.”
As villains go, Gilgeous-Alexander is among the world’s least imposing, especially as he tries to explain the alleged heel turn he has taken by simply doing something everyone tries to do.
His career path was wildly random, like a GPS malfunction. He went from a student manager for Jim Calhoun at UConn to an assistant’s job at Holy Cross, then another assistant’s job at Florida. He was the head coach of the G League Oklahoma City Blue for five seasons before becoming a Thunder assistant and then its head coach in 2020, when he was 35 years old.
“I used to say if you replayed my life a million times, it would only happen this way once,” he says. “And now I get to coach this kick-ass team, so now it’s like 1 in 100 million times. The whole thing’s crazy. There’s no part of me that’s not completely blown away by how I ended up in this situation.”
Nowhere is the Thunder’s chemistry more evident than when the other team has the ball. OKC plays the kind of defense that would work well in a horror movie. It happens two or three times a game: The court contracts, the sidelines and baselines closing in like false walls. They swarm, and there’s no room to move. You get around one guy only to be met by two more. There are five bodies but, improbably, 20 sets of hands, and before you can call timeout they’ve scored 12 straight.
It starts in the time it takes for someone — Devin Booker or Dillon Brooks in the first round, LeBron James or Austin Reaves in the second — to dribble innocently into the sea of arms and legs. The ball is deflected and the Thunder are off, all five of them, as if responding to an alarm they alone can hear. It builds, too, possession after possession, basket after basket, just like the “OKC” chant, and it ends only when they decide to end it.
SO MANY CHARACTER actors, so many subplots. Eight straight wins in the playoffs, more than six of them without Jalen Williams and his injured hamstring, have pushed the Thunder bench players into the spotlight. Ajay Mitchell, taking Williams’ minutes, averaged 22.5 points in the sweep of the Lakers. Jared McCain, taking Mitchell’s minutes, had 18 points in 18 minutes in Game 2 against Los Angeles.
After each of Jaylin’s games, even 21 in the yard, Michael would sit with his son and review high-level concepts such as positioning and spacing. He taught his son not only how to take a charge, Jaylin’s specialty, but how to anticipate when and where it should happen. “We’d sit in the living room and he would show me clips on his phone,” Jaylin says. “You should have been here. When he goes there, you go here. Having him walk me through those moments helped me be the player I am.”
Michael Williams texts his son before every game: Love you, son. Be aggressive and shoot your shot if it’s there.
And after nearly every game they go through the same routine: Michael will pull out his phone if they’re together in Oklahoma City, or he’ll FaceTime Jaylin if the Thunder are on the road. Michael will point the phone at the clips he has recorded on his television and sometimes put a kitchen chair or two in the middle of the room to play the role of Jaylin’s opponents. “He thinks he’s in the NBA,” Jaylin says.
Jaylin Williams has some of the best basketball minds in the world teaching him the intricacies of the game, but there he is in a hotel room somewhere, watching his father turn kitchen chairs into imaginary defenders. He listens and nods along, sometimes capturing a screenshot for his own memories, and before he hangs up, he thanks his father and tells him he loves him. Is he ever tempted to tell his father he’s got this?
“Oh, yeah,” Hartenstein said, trying to play it cool. “I’m Isaiah Hartenstein. I play center for the Thunder.”
Hartenstein says he loves that story because it allows him to feel normal, just a guy volunteering his time and not a wealthy athlete trying to stay on the right side of karma. It also helps explain why he feels compelled to keep going.
It’s in keeping with the theme of the lush grass and the perfectly aligned basketballs: Even the worst day in the city’s history is an opportunity to isolate the dignity of the relief efforts from the outside acts that precipitated the tragedy.
I brought a notebook, just in case, and headed to the memorial two days before the 31st anniversary of the bombing. I was staring at a collection of photographs honoring the first responders and rescue workers, still slightly numb from listening to the audio recording of a meeting of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board that took place at the exact moment the Ryder truck exploded, when a woman next to me pointed to a photo of a group of aid workers sorting food. “That’s me right there.”
She showed me another photograph of rescuers balancing on blocks of rubble as torn metal sheeting hung down from the floor above. The days after the bombing were rainy and windy, she says, and those metal sheets, like stalactites, swung in the air. “It was like wind chimes,” she tells me. “You couldn’t call it a melody because of what it represented, but it was eerie.”
This is why Presti believes it’s important that every member of the organization pays a visit, to see and hear and feel what so many of the people who fill their arena experienced 31 years ago. Grimes stood in silence, staring at the photographs on the wall.
“All these years later, it’s funny what you remember,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “That sound is something I still hear.”
HOW DID THIS particular group of players converge in this time and place to give Oklahoma City an NBA title, with the promise of more? How did it become what Lakers coach JJ Redick calls “one of the greatest teams ever in NBA history”? This brings us back, inevitably, to the issue of credit; not who wants it, but who deserves it.
Toward the end of Holmgren’s only year at Gonzaga, Presti made the trip to Spokane to watch the 7-1 forward practice. In Holmgren’s mind, it wasn’t a transformative moment. He was a big deal, projected to go no lower than third in the 2022 draft, and having a team executive show up to watch him play basketball had become like wallpaper.
But, as Holmgren learned later, Presti wasn’t there to watch him play basketball. The basketball evaluation had already been settled, so Presti was there to perform his unique alchemy, to watch him be a human being, to see how he interacted with his teammates and coaches. He wanted to see how Holmgren’s personality, not necessarily his game, would fit into the structure he’d built in Oklahoma City.