On the same day that Kevin Durant changed teams yet again, the concept of NBA championship-contenders needing a \u201cBig Three\u201d died in Game 7 of the Finals.<\/p>\n
Oh, the irony.<\/p>\n
The Thunder \u2014 who once had a young Big Three of Durant, James Harden and Russell Westbrook \u2014 completed their decade-long rebuild from losing three homegrown future Hall of Famers by winning their first NBA title in Oklahoma City<\/a>, with a 103-91 victory in a winner-take-all game that was marred by Tyrese Haliburton\u2019s devastating injury<\/a>.<\/p>\n The new champions paired NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with Jalen Williams (Second-Team All-NBA) and featured five others who averaged double-figure points during the regular season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the same day that Kevin Durant changed teams yet again, the concept of NBA championship-contenders needing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,4517,126,938,185,6,1220,11,179,3823,209,66,196,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-118445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba-playoffs","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-beyond-the-back-page","10":"tag-indiana-pacers","11":"tag-kevin-durant","12":"tag-lebron-james","13":"tag-nba","14":"tag-nba-finals","15":"tag-nba-playoffs","16":"tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","17":"tag-post-sports-newsletters","18":"tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","19":"tag-sports","20":"tag-sports-plus","21":"tag-tyrese-haliburton"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114732678830703003","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}