On the leaderboard of all-time N.B.A. finals appearances — Lakers (32), Celtics (23), Warriors (12) — you will have to scan very far down to find the Oklahoma City Thunder. This week, when the Thunder face the Indiana Pacers for the championship, it will be the team’s second trip. That might not sound impressive — until you consider that the franchise has existed for only 17 years. (The Celtics have been around since 1946.) The Thunder was born, chaotically, in 2008, and since then the team has operated at a level of success that puts many older organizations to shame.
In its eyeblink of an existence, OKC has made five conference finals and produced three league M.V.P.s. Since 2009, it has won more regular-season games than any team except the Celtics. Thunder players, past and present, have driven a disproportionate amount of the league’s recent drama. In a sport where relevance is hard to sustain, OKC seems overdue for a down period — underachieving stars, iffy chemistry, a slow slide into mediocrity.
Instead, somehow, the Thunder are better than they have ever been. This season, the team won a shocking 68 games, tied for the fifth-most in N.B.A. history, and smashed the record for a stat called point differential — basically, a measure of how badly you steamroll everything in your path. (OKC outscored opponents by an average of 12.9 points per game, breaking the 1972 Lakers’ average of 12.3.) This Thunder team is young, feisty, wild, precise, mean, giddy and overloaded with talent. It enters the finals as heavy favorites to win its first championship.
No team, however, reaches the peak of basketball glory without at least one near-death experience.
OKC’s came a few weeks ago, against the Denver Nuggets, in Game 7 of the second round of the playoffs. The series was an instant classic. The fact that the Thunder survived, and the way they did so, is a perfect illustration of what makes the team so special.
For OKC, the first round of the playoffs went exactly according to plan: They annihilated the Memphis Grizzlies, winning the opening game by 51. But that joy didn’t last for long. Because in the second round, the Thunder ran into a serious problem — one of the biggest problems in the history of basketball.