Aug. 24, 2026, 1:00 p.m. CT
Falling five wins shy of their back-to-back ambitions, the Oklahoma City Thunder must find a way to sit on the NBA throne once again. Even if it’s with fewer weapons than before. They’ll enter the 2026-27 season as co-title favorites — alongside the San Antonio Spurs.
Those types of title-or-bust expectations invite all types of scrutiny and over-analyzing. Welcome to being one of the NBA’s main characters. The Thunder should be used with living in the high-leverage world at this point. In a couple of Aug. 2026 podcasts, The Ringer’s Zach Lowe amped up the pressure.
Lowe recently published a two-part podcast series where he listed the top-10 NBA players facing the most pressure in the 2026-27 season. Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams both made the rankings. Williams at No. 1 and Holmgren at No. 3.
Here’s what Lowe had to say on why Williams and Holmgren face some of the highest pressure in the upcoming NBA year. A lot has to do with OKC’s title expectations and helping Shai Gilgeous-Alexander get a second ring to cement himself as an all-time great:
Jalen Williams
“It’s a duh pick because yeah, obviously his health is a major factor for them. His hamstring, he couldn’t get over it last year. He came back and then he hurt his wrist and the hamstring kept flaring up over and over again. He couldn’t play until the end of the playoffs. This dude was putting up monstrous games in the NBA Finals — including a 40-point game in Game 5 of the Finals. He’s had some huge playoff games along the way and now there’s no Dort, there’s no Wiggins, there’s no Joe and his availability is now essential to them.
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“This is no longer like, ‘We can sorta scrounge by until there’s a Game 7 with the Spurs with JDub not playing.’ Dort sorta leaves the small-ball power forward role behind him. Now, they need Jalen Williams to fill that hole among others.
“He’s just an awesome, awesome player whose lost last season, I thought, was just under-discussed because he’s that good. He was a legitimate All-NBA player. Their depth is not quite as a plus as it was last year. They lost some size. We both had Chet on our list. He’s sorta an offensive question mark, to say the least. The competition around them, particularly in San Antonio, is only going to get better.
“They need not even two-years-ago Jalen Williams. They need an even better version of that. Like, ‘Hey, is this guy a top-12 player, two-way player?’ Jalen Williams to win the championship. By the way, those are the stakes. The Thunder have won one title.”
Chet Holmgren
“His defense remains stalwart in that series, but our lasting image of Chet Holmgren, when the chips were down in a Game 7 against the rival that’s going to define his NBA life for the next five years — the team and individual of him in Victor Wembanyama. Our lasting image of him is passing up wide-open 3s and one play where he caught the ball kinda in the triple-threat position, but closer to the baseline of the right wing. It was like quicksand opened in the floor.
“He literally just tried to dribble and fell over and that was the end of Chet Holmgren. He averaged 11 points per game in the Western Conference Finals. He took 11 3s total in seven games, which is completely inexcusable. He became a completely offensive zero for most of the series. Given that the Thunder had to sacrifice a lot of depth this summer to get under the second apron, it just can’t happen again.
“He falls into a bucket where a lot of big guys live. Bam Adebayo lives here; sometimes Anthony Davis even lives here. Where I think their great offensive games create expectations for people. Like, why don’t they average 25 a game? Now Anthony Davis has. But why doesn’t Anthony Davis average 30 a game? They just don’t play that way. They’re not built to play that way. It’s not the nature of their game.
“But you can’t give me a zero. You got to give me 18. You got to abuse a couple of switches. You got to screen and roll for some dunks and have some impact on the game offensively. What was really interesting in that Spurs series is their total reluctance to play Chet Holmgren at the five at all.
“If you look at what they did in the offseason, it looks like they’re still reluctant to play Chet Holmgren at the five. They lost a lot of their wing depth. They re-signed Isaiah Hartenstein over keeping Lu Dort and others. They drafted another center in that Mara kid from Michigan. They kept Jaylin Williams. I have two Thunder players in my top 10. He was one of them
“I think this is his Dirk-goes-to-the-Outback moment after the We-Believe loss. Where he just vanished off the face of the Earth and came back literally from the Australian Outback a better player. This is the moment that could define Chet Holmgren’s career. It could go Dirk Nowitzki or it could go Ben Simmons. I expect it to go closer to Dirk Nowitzki, but we’ll see.”