Why Thunder are perfectly set up to be next NBA dynasty after winning first championship in OKC

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The Oklahoma City Thunder are your 2024-25 NBA champions. That sentence has felt inevitable not just this year, but really, for the past several at least. We’ve been barreling towards this moment ever since that fateful night in July of 2019 when the Los Angeles Clippers handed them Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a mountain of first-round picks on a silver platter. Sam Presti has built them slowly and methodically ever since with tonight’s 103-91 victory as the goal.

For most teams, the moment a championship is won is the culmination of such an effort. For the Thunder, it is a launching point. 

Presti never rushed. He never repurposed those draft picks for a veteran star. He never panicked into breaking up his young core. His goal was not to build a single champion, but rather, a sustainable winner that brings several trophies home to Oklahoma. Tonight was step one. The question now is what comes next. What needs to happen for the Thunder to build the dynasty they’ve spent years planning?

Smooth sailing next season

Fortunately for Oklahoma City, they have to do precisely nothing where next season is concerned. The entire team is still under contract. Literally all 15 players occupying full-time roster spots are locked in for next season through guaranteed contracts, non-guaranteed contracts or team options. 

In fact, they’re actually facing a bit of a short-term roster crunch. They have two first-round picks in next week’s draft, No. 15 and No. 24, that will need slots as well. The likeliest move for the Thunder will be to use one of the picks, trade Dillon Jones to clear a spot for that player, and then trade the other for future selections to duck the roster crunch. As of right now, the 2025-26 Thunder aren’t even set to pay the luxury tax. That’s pretty important. They’re going to want to delay their repeater tax as long as possible, because as soon as the 2025-26 season ends, this team gets monstrously expensive.

Things are going to get pricey

After next season, the rookie contracts for both Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams expire. At a bare minimum, both should start their next contracts at 25% of the cap, the max for most players with their amount of experience. That would mean both should be expected to earn at least $42.5 million for the 2026-27 season, but there’s a chance they each make more. Just as some veterans are eligible for supermax deals, players coming off of rookie deals like Holmgren and Williams are eligible for Rose Rule bumps. If either of them wins MVP or Defensive Player of the Year or earns an All-NBA selection, their max jumps from 25% of the cap up to 30%. That would boost their starting salary up to around $51 million. Both contracts, regardless of starting point, can rise by 8% annually and last five years.

That’s expensive enough, but things get even harder a year after that. That’s when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will presumably kick off his own supermax deal. Having just won MVP, Gilgeous-Alexander is already eligible to sign it. It’s just a matter of when. If he does so this offseason, he’ll add roughly $293 million to his contract over four years. If he prefers, he can add five years and $380 million by waiting until next season. Either way, his salary can jump all the way up to 35% of the cap when the 2027-28 season begins. That’s a starting salary of $65.5 million or so.

Part of what has allowed the Thunder to build their remarkable depth has been how little they are paying their best players. They have one more cheap season for Williams and Holmgren and two more years of below-market money for Gilgeous-Alexander. However, those prime dynasty years are going to get a good deal more difficult. That’s when the hard financial choices begin.

Decisions to make

The first cut is rather straightforward. The Thunder prepared it the moment they signed Isaiah Hartenstein. The final year of his deal, which comes right as Holmgren and Williams get their bump, is a team option. In all likelihood, that means Hartenstein will not be on the team for the 2026-27 campaign. Fortunately, the Thunder have a trick they’ve used a few times to ensure he has a replacement on the roster. 

That player will presumably be Jaylin Williams, who has a team option for roughly the minimum next season. The Thunder could keep him for an ultra-cheap price, but it makes far more sense for them to do what they just did with Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe: decline the option. Why? Because that would make him a restricted free agent. They’d have to pay him more next season (which could launch them into the tax if they don’t make other moves), but it would allow them to match any offer another team makes him, which immediately limits his market significantly. They used this maneuver to get Joe and Wiggins on team-friendly long-term deals. The idea here will be to do the same with Williams so that when they lose Hartenstein, they have their replacement ready in-house.

There’s another cut coming in the near future, and it’s going to be a painful one. The Thunder still have two more cheap Cason Wallace years, but he too is going to get expensive soon. He is also, sadly, redundant. Wallace, Lu Dort and Alex Caruso all function similarly as perimeter stoppers. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, of course, but the Thunder aren’t going to be able to keep all three forever. Caruso just signed a four-year extension during the season. That makes him a bit safer. But Dort, like Hartenstein, has a 2026-27 team option. He is six years younger than Caruso, so it might make more sense just to trade Caruso before his play declines. However, that team option makes Dort an obvious candidate to move before the 2026-27 season begins.

Even more picks on the way?

Here’s the thing about those team options, though: they’re attached to good players. The Thunder don’t have to just decline them and lose them for nothing. Depending on how proactive they are, they could try to move those contracts early for expiring deals, demand draft-pick compensation from the teams they work with. Those draft picks are going to be an essential part of Oklahoma City’s long-term vision.

The Thunder have plenty of them already, and several stand to be quite valuable. Next year alone, they have an unprotected pick from the Clippers and a top-four protected pick from the 76ers. Both are obviously quite vulnerable to injury-related disaster. The 76ers just lived that and escaped a top-six protection with the No. 3 overall pick. There are plenty more picks coming in the years that follow, and the Thunder will probably try to supplement those piles by trading away veterans right as they get expensive.

The idea here is going to be to create a self-perpetuating cycle. The Thunder draft a good player. That player helps them win while he’s cheap. When that player gets close to becoming expensive, he is replaced by another cheap player they’ve drafted and traded for picks that will be used to eventually replace that cheap player. And on and on and on. If the Thunder do this right, they’ll never have to make a significant veteran addition.

Of course, the other benefit to having all of those picks is insurance in case they do need to make such a veteran addition. The hope here will be that Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren and Williams as a three-man core will be enough to keep the Thunder afloat indefinitely. Realistically, weird stuff can happen. Players get hurt, as Indiana experienced in Game 7 when it lost Tyrese Haliburton. Players decide, for whatever reason, that they’d rather play somewhere else. League trends change and players become less valuable. The Thunder don’t want to make a star trade. They’ve already won a championship without making such a deal. But it’s nice to know in the back of their minds that they could if the need ever presented itself.

More likely, if they ever trade picks for veterans it will accomplish one of two things. The first would be to replace an injured player for a championship push. Why waste a year unnecessarily if, say, Holmgren tweaks his knee in January and needs to miss three months? They can always trade for a short-term replacement. Or, if a specific matchup dictates that they need a specific sort of player as a counter, they can take such a swing as well. Those picks are problem-solvers for them. We never know what problems will arise, but this is the NBA. Something always comes up.

Competition on the rise

The “something” for the Thunder might just be copycats. They’ve spent the past half-decade laying a blueprint that other teams are starting to follow. The Houston Rockets aren’t far behind here, having themselves accumulated an impressive collection of young talent while also hoarding picks for sustainability that they didn’t even have to spend to get Kevin Durant. Following behind them are the San Antonio Spurs, who have in Victor Wembanyama perhaps the only player in basketball that should truly scare the Thunder in the long term. Premature or not, the widespread belief is that he will not only be better than Gilgeous-Alexander, but also has a chance to become among the very best players of all time. Maybe Holmgren is his ideal counter. Maybe the Thunder are going to be the Bad Boy Pistons of this era: a multi-time champion that ultimately leads into a greater dynasty led by Wembanyama as this period’s Michael Jordan.

Don’t count the older stars out quite yet, either. Giannis Antetokounmpo isn’t winning a thing in Milwaukee. Nikola Jokić’s outlook in Denver is better, but far from rosy. If either of them winds up on a better team in the next few years, they pose a real threat. So does Luka Dončić. He did beat them last spring, after all. The Los Angeles Lakers have always been able to recruit stars, and now that they have the financial heft of Mark Walter behind them, their future looks brighter than it has in years.

Who in this group winds up truly challenging the Thunder is unknowable at this point, but someone will. Even the Jordan-era Bulls played a couple of Game 7s. Dynasties may exist, but they’re never simple. The Thunder have spent years preparing for theirs, but they aren’t the first team to do so, even in this era. Think back to the Boston Celtics of, say, 2018. They had Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown on rookie deals, a nearly endless supply of draft picks and a roster that had just reached the Eastern Conference finals without Kyrie Irving or Gordon Hayward. They were the Thunder before the Thunder. And they’ve only won a single title since.

The Thunder have thus far done everything right, but doing everything right is just the start. Luck is just as important to any dynastic effort, and only time will tell if the Thunder get enough of it. They’ve done their part. They’re as well-positioned to do this as any team ever has been. But as inevitable as that dynasty may feel right now, it’s going to get harder from here. We don’t quite know how or when, but it will. This is the start of something that could end in more ways than we can imagine.

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