Chasing it for nearly two decades, the Oklahoma City Thunder finally slayed their biggest dragon. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander did what Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook couldn’t — bring home an NBA championship.

The Thunder had one of the greatest seasons ever. A Historic 68-14 regular-season campaign was capped off with a championship run in the playoffs. Gilgeous-Alexander has put himself up there as one of the NBA’s all-time greats with a season that featured an MVP award, Western Conference Finals MVP and NBA Finals MVP.

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In impeccable timing, Kevin Durant’s “Mind the Game” podcast appearance with LeBron James and Steve Nash dropped on the same day Gilgeous-Alexander signed a contract extension to stay in OKC through the 2030-31 season.

One of the topics, poetically enough, was about Durant’s shortcomings in OKC. He spent his first nine years on the Thunder. The future Hall-of-Famer came painfully close several times to a championship, but fell short each time. He then rewrote his legacy when he signed with the Golden State Warriors in 2016. The rest has been history since then.

With time on his side, Durant reflected back on his Thunder tenure. He offered another theory as to why they never won a championship despite having the talent to win multiple — they simply weren’t ready.

“We sped up the timeline. All of us. Each individual player, Serge, you didn’t know, he came out of nowhere. He came out here being the best shot blocker in the league,” Durant said. “I’m averaging 30 at 21 years old. Russell was 22 years old as an All-Star, James Sixth Man at 22, so we exceeded the timeline, so they wasn’t ready for that. That’s just my theory. I don’t know exactly what Sam was thinking or the owner, but my theory is that I don’t think they were ready exactly for us to be contenders every year.”

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Maybe some of that was true. The Thunder took the league by storm with their 2012 NBA Finals appearance. Even though they lost to the Miami Heat, everybody assumed Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden would surely get back at that stage. Nope. Trades and injuries prevented that.

“Since we reached the Finals, you’re supposed to upgrade and fine-tune and make changes around,” Durant said. “You can’t just pull one of the key figures off the team and expect us to continue what we was doing. So I think they were kind of shocked at how fast, how good we got so fast and sometimes you get confused. On top of that, Sam Presti was probably what, 30-something years old? He was young. Everybody was young, trying to figure stuff out, trying to understand what this landscape was.”

Regardless of what you think, Durant’s shortcomings are easier to talk about because of what Gilgeous-Alexander did. The latter did what the former couldn’t. And now he’ll be remembered as the greatest and best player in Thunder history. No semantics needed.

This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: Kevin Durant theorizes his Thunder got too good, too fast