Is this fun for you?

The Thunder are doom. The Thunder are salvation.

Do you miss dynasties?

The Association — really, all the sports leagues — have been pushing for greater parity in the last few decades. More teams having a chance to win it all leads to more engaged fanbases, the logic goes. Maybe that’s true! It makes sense to me. I like watching games without a feeling of predestination; at least, I think I do. I say I do.

But the NBA’s history, when viewed in all its peaks and valleys, certainly seems most mountainous during dynastic periods. The Russell era of the 1960s, the Bird-Magic diarchy of the 80s, the Jordan dictatorship of the 90s, and the Shaq/Kobe dominance at the turn of the millennium. Those periods of competitive armageddon are also the most revered epochs, the times when the league was ostensibly at its most popular.

It’s not a coincidence that Russell, Bird, Magic, Jordan, Shaq, and Kobe are some of the greatest and most popular basketball players of all time. Rightly or wrongly, winning championships carries more weight in basketball than anywhere else. When it matters that much, generational greatness and parity become polar opposites. Basketball fans have typically responded better to the latter than the former.

There is another pseudo-dynastic period of a more recent vintage, when the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors met in four straight Finals. If you’re old enough to remember that, was it fun for you? Genuine question.

Let’s jog down memory lane. The East was LeBron James’ punching bag for those four years. There was no drama. At one point, the Cavs, tied 2-2 with Toronto in the Eastern Conference Finals, woke up and exploded for a 38-point win in Game 5. “I’ve been a part of some really adverse situations,” said James, “and I just didn’t believe that this was one of them.” He was using the past tense for a series that was still in the present! Naturally, Cleveland blew out Toronto in Game 6, too.

The other side wasn’t quite the same thing. Golden State didn’t exactly cakewalk through the West every year (I’ll forever believe Houston was one Chris Paul hammy away from taking the Western Conference Finals in 2018, and the Warriors were pushed to seven by the Thunder in 2016, too, in the series that famously led to Kevin Durant leaving to join Golden State). But the end result was always the same: Another Warriors conference championship.

To many people during that era, the regular season felt pointless, a slog to get to the good stuff — and those Finals were good, at least in 2015 and 2016. After Durant joined forces with Steph Curry and Co., the Western Conference Finals felt like the real climax to the season.

My question, again. Was that fun for you? I apologize if it sounds like I’m framing this negatively. “Yes” is a perfectly valid option. James is widely regarded as either the best or second-best player ever. He was in full command of his powers. The Durant Warriors were arguably the best team of all time (certainly, given the league’s advancements over the years, they were the most skilled). Watching them operate on a purely basketball level was a religious experience. On the right nights, you caught a glimpse of a higher plane.

I certainly had fun! I’m not the right guy to give my opinion here, because I love the trees too much to care about the forest, but I do wonder how much the last decade of basketball has changed people’s memories of that era one way or another.

Adam Silver, for one, didn’t like it despite relatively strong TV ratings. The league has increasingly tried to level the playing field to prevent another Warriors/Durant situation again. The implementation of the recent CBA, with its Aprons of Death, is merely the latest in a string of adjustments to ensure the best and richest teams can’t dominate year after year.

And yet, despite all that, the Oklahoma City Thunder are here.

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Let’s get the obvious caveats out of the way. The Thunder have won just one championship so far, and even that may not have happened without Tyrese Haliburton’s devastating injury in the opening moments of Game 7. Their best players are young and haven’t yet become expensive. The aprons ensure that the team will have to make some hard choices in the coming years. We haven’t had a repeat champion in seven years, despite the fact that at least two other teams (the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics) felt like they were set up at the time of their chips for a mini-dynasty. Increasingly, it’s the healthiest team that wins the title. According to ESPN, it’s never been tougher to build a dynasty.

And yet, it sure feels like we’ll be looking back at the 2020s in the same way we look back at the 60s and 90s.

It starts at the top. In basketball, it always starts at the top.

This will sound like heresy, but stick with me. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander doesn’t have the overall body of work to compare careers, but he has matched (and maybe even surpassed) Michael Jordan’s peak level as a regular-season scorer. Jordan’s best pure bucket-getting year might’ve been his first MVP season, in 1988, when he averaged 43.6 points per 100 possessions on true shooting that was 12% higher (relatively) than league average.

SGA right now? A whopping 46.5 points per 100 possessions on true shooting that is 13% higher than league average. And it was 45.9 points per 100 on 11% higher relative true shooting last season, his first MVP campaign.

To clarify, I’m not putting SGA in the GOAT conversation; he might not even be my MVP so far this season! And Jordan’s postseason scoring binges elevate him above the young Thunder superstar as a scorer overall. But I say all that to prove that putting Gilgeous-Alexander on the court results in points, lots of them. And given that he’s at worst a solid defender (and a few smart people have made the case he should be an All-Defensive Team candidate), all those points tend to lead to a whole lot of wins.

Zooming out, the Storm-noises currently have the fourth-best offense and top-ranked defense in the league. That’s on the back of last year’s second-ranked offense and number-one defense.

They’ve done all that without much injury luck. SGA has been healthy, but they were missing Chet Holmgren and/or Isaiah Hartenstein for most of last season. Jalen Williams, their second-best player, has yet to play this season. Alex Caruso, Lu Dort, and a bevy of role players have missed plenty of time, too.

Regardless of who suits up, OKC is Death dual-wielding scythes. With an efficient, uber-high-volume scorer like SGA, a wealth of secondary playmaking and shooting, and a top-to-bottom defense like we haven’t seen since perhaps the Ben Wallace-era Pistons, the Thunder leave no room for error. Unfortunately for everybody else, they force people into more errors than anyone!

If you can encapsulate the Oklahoma City experience into one stat, it would be this: Last year, OKC simultaneously turned it over less than anyone and turned others over more than anyone. This year, they’re nearly doing the same.

This team is too freaking good. And unlike the Celtics and Nuggets, they aren’t set up just for the present.

Sure, SGA, Holmgren, and Williams will combine for 75% of the salary cap in 2026-27, and 85% in 2027-28. Today’s league values depth more than ever, and that’s a whole lot of dinero wrapped up into three players.

But all three are young. SGA is just 27; Holmgren and Williams are 23 and 24. The latter two haven’t even sniffed their prime years yet! An army of flexible, talented, and cheap supporting actors surrounds them. OKC can afford to spend on the top end of its roster because it’s done such a good job managing the bottom.

An example: Aaron Wiggins averages the seventh-most minutes on the roster. Aaron Wiggins is making less than $10 million per year through 2029 (on a declining contract, naturally). Aaron Wiggins does cool s*** like this all the time:

It’s unfair!

Even Williams’ injury is almost certainly a good thing in the long term for the Thunder. It virtually guarantees he won’t reach All-NBA this season, which would have raised his salary by another few million each year. It’s also given the offense enough room for players like Ajay Mitchell to spread their wings.

Mitchell perhaps has been the Thunder’s third-best player. He will naturally have a smaller role on Williams’ return, but it can only be a positive for him to have shouldered such a burden so successfully in just his second year.

That’s part and parcel of why the Thunder are so set up for dominance. If Sam Presti, the architect of this masterpiece, needs to replace the relatively more expensive minutes of guys like Hartenstein, Dort, or Isaiah Joe, they’ve got plenty of young guys ready and able to take on more responsibility. Jaylin Williams, Cason Wallace, Wiggins, Brooks Barnhizer, and Nikola Topic are waiting patiently for their turn (get well soon, Topic!). Plus, the Thunder own so many draft picks in the future, including several unprotected first-rounders from the Clippers. They might get a top-five pick this season! If you want to see a real dynasty, give the Thunder Cam Boozer or Darryn Peterson.

OKC could become a talent pipeline for the rest of the league; when one 20-something-year-old becomes too good and too expensive, they’ll leave and be replaced by one of the Thunder’s newer, even younger guys. SGA has at least three or four more prime years, and I suspect his game will age quite well. We’ve seen DeMar DeRozan, a broadly similar player archetype, maintain superb scoring efficiency into his mid-30s. To put this into SAT-format verbal analogies, Alexander:DeRozan::bald eagle:chickadee. As long as SGA’s out there at this level, the Thunder will always be elite.

Health, more than finances or talent, is the ultimate wild card. The modern NBA chews up players like never before. But Alexander is almost never hurt now that the team isn’t incentivized to tank (weird how that happens!), and the Thunder have an above-.500 record without him over the last few seasons, anyway. Without Williams, they are 14-1 this season and are on track for one of the best point differentials of all time. Holmgren might be an All-NBA player this year; the team hasn’t even noticed his absences.

Oklahoma City has the league’s best front office in Presti and his crew. They have arguably the league’s best coach in Mark Daigneault. They have the reigning MVP and two perfectly-fitting star-in-their-own-right sidekicks. They have depth; they have flexibility; they have draft picks. We’ve never seen a modern team set up for continued success like OKC.

And for what it’s worth, they’re a beautiful aesthetic experience. Maybe you have some issues with SGA’s efforts to draw free throws, but he’s far from the only superstar doing so (and the Thunder draw fewer free throws than average). Complaints about OKC’s physicality on defense are echoes of the exact same charges levied against every great defense of times past (as well as Orlando, Houston, and Detroit today!). You are entitled to your views, and I’m not trying to change your mind. But OKC isn’t doing anything we don’t see other teams do. A championship run just means we see it a lot.

In my opinion, the swarming, be-tentacled defense is must-watch entertainment. The offense is the perfect combination of old-school (SGA’s ridiculous mid-post footwork) and new (their seven-footer center is bombing threes and taking dudes off the dribble). The viewing experience is sublime.

But familiarity breeds contempt. If Oklahoma City goes on to win, say, three more championships in the next five years, would that be good for the league? History says yes, and we might look back on the 2020s as the time when Shai became a timeless global icon like MJ, Magic, Bird, Kobe, LeBron, and Curry.

But that’s history. That’s too broad. Would inevitable, ceaseless, merciless greatness unfolding before your eyes be fun for you?