As the Oklahoma City Thunder prepare for their NBA championship reign, they’ve found themselves at a familiar spot. The 2025-26 regular season will be another year where at least one player will populate their daily injury report.
The Thunder announced on Friday that Thomas Sorber sustained a torn ACL. He will miss the entire 2025-26 season. The 19-year-old suffered the right knee injury in an offseason workout. Just a brutal blow for the No. 15 pick of the 2025 NBA draft.
The Thunder added Sorber with the hopes he’d learn under Chet Holmgren, Isaiah Hartenstein and Jaylin Williams. While he likely would’ve had a quiet rookie season buried on the depth chart, he could’ve absorbed their knowledge and applied it on the court.
Now that possibility is removed. If the Thunder think Sorber can be Hartenstein’s long-term replacement after next season, they’ll need to make that decision with zero NBA data to work with. The Georgetown product will go 18 months between games as he missed the last two months of his collegiate season with foot surgery.
It’s been an unfortunate trend for the Thunder. A redshirt season isn’t anything new. Holmgren missed the 2022-23 season with a Lisfranc injury he suffered in an offseason run and Nikola Topic missed the 2024-25 season with a torn ACL he sustained a month before he was drafted.
That’s three of the last four seasons where the Thunder had their top draft pick miss their first year. That’s gotta be some sort of record. Rarely do rookies get the unfortunate roll of the dice of a season-ending injury before training camp even kicks off. For it to happen three times in four years is just some flat-out bad luck — even if you want to add the caveat that Topic fell to No. 12 because of his knee injury.
If any NBA franchise understands what it takes to help a first-year player deal with being out for an entire season and rehabbing in the background, it’s the Thunder. Of course, you’d rather see them learn with firsthand experience. But you can’t control freak injuries.