Lowering his shoulders, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drives to the teeth of the defense. He kicks it out to one of a handful of open teammates. Getting a decent look because of the reigning MVP’s gravity, you hear a clank instead of a swish.
That’s been the modus operandi of the Oklahoma City Thunder through their 5-0 start to the 2025-26 regular season. And really, since their playoff run to an NBA championship this past year.
Outside shooting woes have plagued the Thunder. To the point that a hospital visit may be necessary. From Lu Dort to Cason Wallace to Jaylin Williams and more, all of OKC’s role players have forgotten how to shoot from the outside in the infancy stages of this season.
While they’re 5-0, it’s been four close wins. If the Thunder want to return to last season’s blowout dominance, the outside shot needs some self-correction. They’re currently 23rd in 3-pointers made at 11.4. Even worse is that they’re dead last in percentage at 28.8%.
Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault evaluated the Thunder’s outside shooting. While it’s a broad question, as they come in a variety of ways, he did say they need to generally be better at creating quality looks from deep. You can’t have a drive-heavy scorer and also be bad from the outside in your drive-and-kick offense.
Before escaping with a 107-101 win over the Sacramento Kings, where the Thunder went 14-of-44 (31.8%) from 3, Daigneault discussed their outside shooting woes through the first handful of games into the new season. While you can’t overreact to the sample size, the process hasn’t been crisp either.
“I would say there’s some that have been fine, there’s some that haven’t been great. Our share of high-quality threes is lower right now than it was last season. But in a four-game sample, we’re not going to overreact to that,” Daigneault said. “We’re going to be aware of it, obviously. But we have 78 more games in the season. So it can be slippery when you start overreacting to a very small sample, but the quality is down a little bit. That’s one of the things that we have to address and try to improve as we continue on here.”
Eventually, things should even out. The Thunder are too talented to be the worst outside shooting team in the league. The eventual returns of Jalen Williams and Isaiah Joe should help with that. Both are some of OKC’s better outside shooters.
That said, this continues a bad trend where the offense has been bogged down and everything falls on Gilgeous-Alexander’s shoulders to carry. That’s not a long-term plan for success. The Thunder must figure out how to generate better offense.