For the third straight season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will finish as the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference.<\/p>\n
For the second straight season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will finish with the best record in the NBA and have home court advantage for as long as they are playing.<\/p>\n
All that came after the Thunder easily handled the Clippers on Wednesday night at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, 128-110. And those two stats above just begin to touch on what the Thunder have done:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Oklahoma City is the first team with back-to-back best records in the NBA since the 2019-20 Milwaukee Bucks.
\u2022 OKC is trying to become the first team with back-to-back best records in the NBA and to win the NBA title since Michael Jordan\u2019s Bulls in 1996-97.
\u2022 Only five other teams have had three or more consecutive seasons with a No. 1 seed \u2014 most recently the 2015-17 Golden State Warriors \u2014 and those five teams all won multiple NBA titles in that stretch.
\u2022 This was the Thunder\u2019s 64th win. If they win one of their remaining two games, they will become only the third team with back-to-back 65+ win seasons, joining the peak Jordan Bulls and the Curry\/Durant-era Warriors (again, teams that won multiple titles).<\/p>\n
OKC didn\u2019t coast into this, it has won 19-of-20 down the stretch. It also has reached these records despite its second-best player, Jalen Williams, only playing in 33 games this season due to injury (plus the team has faced a lot of other injuries, having guys in and out of the lineup). Part of why the Thunder have pulled this off is that, to a man, they have bought into what coach Mark Daigneault is selling: focusing on yourself, on short-term improvement, and if you do that the big picture will take care of itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the first thing for us is just making sure that we\u2019re taking care of our stuff,\u201d Daigneault said the night before, when the Thunder beat the Lakers. \u201cIt starts with how we\u2019re playing, the habits we\u2019re trying to sharpen what we\u2019re trying to get done. You go through the regular season, there\u2019s different opponents every night that present different challenges, but it always starts between you and yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oklahoma City will open the playoffs at home the weekend of April 18 against one of the teams that have fought their way out of the play-in (Phoenix, the LA Clippers, Portland or Golden State). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the third straight season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will finish as the No. 1 seed in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3789],"tags":[7,559,4034,192,4032,251,135,4033,4031,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-706743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-clippers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-clippers","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-clippers","12":"tag-laclippers","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-clippers","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-losangelesclippers","17":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116375869448003261","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706743","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=706743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}