The Thunder snatched the Celtics’ chain in possible NBA Finals preview

The Thunder ate the Celtics’ lunch and proved their ready to win the championship right now.

The Oklahoma City Thunder are on a rocket ship to the top of the NBA. It feels like they’re speed-running the tanking-to-championship playbook in a way the league hasn’t really seen before, and the scary thing is they’re still at the very beginning of what should be a long run of contention.

Three years ago, the Oklahoma City Thunder were knee-deep in a rebuild, ending the season with fewer than 25 wins for the second consecutive campaign. Two years ago, OKC took a big jump up the standings, going from a 24-win team to a 40-win team, but still failed to make the playoffs. Last year, Oklahoma City took an even bigger leap, improving their win total to 57 games and finishing with the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference. The Thunder’s first playoff run died in the second round at the hands the Dallas Mavericks, with P.J. Washington’s hot shooting helping send Oklahoma City packing in six games.

The Thunder added a pair of key reinforcements over the summer with Isaiah Hartenstein and Alex Caruso while keeping their loaded young core in place. Now, OKC is dominating the West to an even greater degree, winning at a 70-game pace despite Chet Holmgren, their second best player, being out for months with a hip injury.

At this point, the Thunder can only measure themselves against the very best teams in the league. That made their showdown with the reigning champion Boston Celtics must-see TV. With Boston’s roster mostly healthy, fans were treated to a possible 2025 NBA Finals preview … as long as they paid for NBA TV, and chose to watch it over the final week of the NFL regular season.

The Thunder beat the Celtics, 105-92, in perhaps the most impressive win any team has secured this season. After trailing by 10 points at halftime, the Thunder’s historically good defense locked down for its greatest performance yet, holding the mighty Celtics to only 27 second half points.

With Boston trying to come back in the fourth quarter, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander packed fellow First-Team All-NBA candidate Jayson Tatum with a chasedown block, and then threw a perfect lob to Hartenstein for the and-one dunk. In the moment, you could feel both the present and future of the NBA start to shake.

Can you have a torch-passing moment in early January? No, not really. But after wiping out a red hot New York Knicks team in their previous game despite playing on the second end of the back-to-back, the Thunder’s dismantling of the Celtics very much feels like a warning shot that they aren’t just the league’s team of the future — they’re the team of right now, too.

What the Thunder just did the Celtics is genuinely hard to believe. Last season, the Celtics set the NBA record for offensive efficiency in a season, and ran through the playoffs with a 16-3 record to win the title. This year, Boston is merely No. 2 in the league in offensive efficiency. Oklahoma City didn’t just beat them, they shut down the champs so bad that Boston’s 27 second half points were the fewest by any team in the league this season.

The Celtics shot 9-of-46 from three-point range, just 19.6 percent. The Celtics take and make more threes than anyone, and Oklahoma City shut their water off. Everyone will wonder if this one cold shooting night, or a hint of something more serious.

The Thunder just looked like the more physical team. OKC has been wearing down opponents all year with a ridiculous amount of length and defensive discipline. The Thunder are posting the best defensive efficiency relevative to the rest of the league since the 2003-2004 Spurs, and seeing them shut down the spread-and-shred Celtics offense in such dramatic fashion was the ultimate show of force. Boston just couldn’t get anything going in the second half with a never-ending string of long and strong defenders.

It’s hard to have the best player on the floor against Boston, because there are only a handful of guys in the league who can out-play Tatum. Gilgeous-Alexander is one of them. SGA is a 30+ point machine, and he did it again against Boston, slicing and dicing one of the league’s better defenses at every opportunity.

SGA is quietly turning into one of the better scoring guards in league history. That’s not an understatement — there’s a new stat putting himself in the same company as Michael Jordan almost every week. Shai is always on, and his combination of quickness, strength, length, flexibility, and ability to score with either hand, off either foot, is effectively unguardable.

The Thunder are of course much more than SGA + a great defense. They’re so deep throughout the rotation with players who can handle, pass, and shoot that no one feels overextended. Instead, easy shots just seem to find the Thunder’s role players.

Against Boston, it was Lu Dort hitting three big three-pointers in the closing minutes to put away the win.

It’s incredible that the Thunder are this good with Holmgren still sidelined. The young 7’1 big man was playing at an All-NBA and First-Team All-Defense level this year before his injury. He should be back before the playoffs, but it’s clear OKC is an elite team without him. The Hartenstein insurance plan is proving to be genius. The mind runs wild at the thought of what the Thunder will look like when Holmgren and Caruso return from injury.

This was the best possible advertisement for what the NBA game looks like at its best in today’s age. Sadly, the game wasn’t on national TV, instead buried on cable during an NFL Sunday. Maybe the ratings problem starts there?

The Thunder have multiple future first round picks in every draft for the rest of the 2020s. Gilgeous-Alexander is in his prime at 26 years old, and he’s the best guard in the world right now. Holmgren doesn’t turn 23 years old until May. Jalen Williams doesn’t turn 24 years old until April. The Thunder might have the best top-end talent in the league, they probably have the best depth, and it’s clear they have by far the greatest collection of future assets of any team.

The Celtics still felt like the most intimidating team in the NBA coming into Sunday. After the Thunder’s remarkable win, I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore.

A dynasty is on the table for the Thunder, but it’s also so hard just to win one championship. The Thunder can’t raise banners before they actually win them, but their performance against the Celtics was so convincing that it’s easy to dream about where this franchise is eventually headed.