OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma City Thunder took home the 2025 NBA championship — the first in the franchise’s 17 years here — thanks to a 103-91 victory over the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, capping what was a historically dominant year and a remarkable turnaround.
The Thunder went from winning 22 and 24 games, respectively, in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons to claiming the top spot in the Western Conference playoffs each of the past two seasons. They followed up a 56-win campaign last season with a 68-win season this year — one of the seven best single-season marks in NBA history. They also set the record for the largest point differential of all time in the regular season, smashing the previous mark that had stood for more than half a century.
Oklahoma City ultimately won 84 games between the regular season and the playoffs, tying the 1996-97 Chicago Bulls for third most in any season. Only Golden State (88 in 2016-17) and the Bulls (87 in 2015-16) won more.
Despite the Thunder’s accomplishment, Game 7 may be most remembered for an unfortunate reason as Pacers superstar Tyrese Haliburton suffered what his father confirmed was a left Achilles injury while trying to drive to the basket with 4:55 left in the first quarter. He would be ruled out for the rest of the game a short time later with a lower right leg injury – bringing what had been, to that point, a breathtaking postseason to a heartbreaking conclusion.
The Pacers hung tough immediately following the devastating injury and took a 48-47 lead into halftime. However that’s when Oklahoma City — behind a brilliant stretch of play from the league’s Most Valuable Player, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — had one of its patented dominating third quarters, outscoring Indiana 34-20 across the 12 minutes to take a 13-point lead into the fourth quarter that the Thunder would never relinquish.
It wouldn’t have been a Pacers playoff game, though, without Indiana making its opponent sweat with a potential comeback. They eventually got what was a 22-point lead down to as little as 10 on Andrew Nembhard’s 3-pointer with just under two minutes remaining. But unlike Indiana’s magical comebacks earlier in these playoffs, Oklahoma City hung on and survived.
“It doesn’t feel real,” Gilgeous-Alexander said after the game. “So many hours. So many moments. So many emotions. So many nights of disbelief. So many nights of belief. It’s crazy to know that we’re all here, but this group worked for it. This group put in the hours and we deserve this.”
The championship is the culmination of the vision of the team’s general manager, Sam Presti, who has been in charge since the franchise’s final year in Seattle in 2007-08. Since arriving in Oklahoma City in 2008, the Thunder have the second-most regular season victories, behind only the Boston Celtics, and the fifth-most postseason victories.
But, until this year, the ultimate prize — a championship — had eluded the Thunder. And, after near misses when they lost in the NBA Finals to the Miami Heat in five games in 2012, and then in the Western Conference finals in both 2014 and 2016, it was unclear it would ever happen for one of the NBA’s smallest-market teams.
Ironically, it did on the same day Kevin Durant, the foundational member of that first championship-caliber Thunder squad, was traded to the Houston Rockets, potentially making them Oklahoma City’s biggest threat to getting out of the Western Conference playoffs again next season.
But while Durant left in 2016, it wouldn’t be until 2019 that the first era of Thunder basketball officially came to a close when Presti shipped out Russell Westbrook and Paul George in a dizzying series of moves that laid the foundation for this current roster — most notably by getting Gilgeous-Alexander in the deal that sent George, and by extension Kawhi Leonard, to the LA Clippers that summer.
And, a couple of weeks later, Presti penned a letter in The Oklahoman, a local Oklahoma City newspaper, to lay out his vision of where the franchise would be headed in the years to come.
“In saying goodbye to the past, we have begun to chart our future,” Presti wrote then. “The next great Thunder team is out there somewhere, but it will take time to seize and discipline to ultimately sustain.”
It turned out that it didn’t take much time at all. Arriving alongside Gilgeous-Alexander in 2019 was Luguentz Dort, an undrafted free agent who has developed into a first-team All-Defense selection. In 2022, Oklahoma City landed its other two long-term foundational pieces in Chet Holmgren, who went second overall out of Gonzaga, and Jalen Williams, who was the 12th overall pick out of Santa Clara.
Both of them played massive roles in OKC’s playoff run. Williams, who struggled at times earlier in these playoffs, had a fantastic series in the Finals, including going for a career-high 40 points in Game 5. Holmgren — who missed more than half of the regular season with a hip injury — didn’t shoot the ball well in the Finals but impacted the game in plenty of other ways.
And with both of them likely to sign long-term contract extensions in the coming weeks — along with Gilgeous-Alexander, who is eligible for a massive one as well — this could only be the beginning for a Thunder team that only has two players on its roster over the age of 27 and is now the second-youngest champion in NBA history behind only the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers.
“They behave like champions. They compete like champions,” Daigneault said. “They root for each other’s success, which is rare in professional sports. I’ve said it many times and now I’m going to say it one more time. They are an uncommon team and now they’re champions.”
OKC’s win continues an unprecedented run of parity in the NBA. The Thunder are the ninth franchise to win a title in NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s 12 seasons. His predecessor, David Stern, saw eight franchises win titles in his 30 seasons as commissioner.
Gilgeous-Alexander, meanwhile, capped off his historic season with 29 points and 12 assists to hit a rare superfecta of honors: regular season MVP, Finals MVP, NBA champion and scoring champion. Doing all of those things put Gilgeous-Alexander on a variety of shortlists, among them becoming the first player to win both the league’s MVP award and a championship in the same season since Stephen Curry with the 2014-15 Golden State Warriors.
That year, Curry won his first championship with a young, suddenly ascendant Warriors team, one that would go on to make six finals appearances in an 8-year span, and a total of four championships as part of the NBA’s last dynastic team.
Time will tell if this will start a similar run for this Thunder team. But to have that sort of run, it has to start with a championship.
And, after 17 years, Oklahoma City can finally say it has its first.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
