[Keown] When I suggest that Jalen Williams, the team’s second-leading scorer and third-team All-NBA player last season, could be the main attraction on 20 or so other teams, Gilgeous-Alexander politely interrupts and says, “It’s 29 if you ask me.”
It seems almost too good to be true, this alternate reality where every piece fits and nobody wants the credit. The players – including league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, or maybe *especially* him – credit Presti and Daigneault and each other when they aren’t extolling the virtues of the training staff and the equipment guys, and even the fans. Presti is so allergic to credit that he avoids the trap entirely by retreating into the background, safe from any stray compliments. Daigneault’s worst cold-sweat, middle-of-the-night fear is waking up to find someone has decreed him to be the reason any of this is happening. If this were a cartoon, it would feature an ornately wrapped gift box sitting in the middle of a gym floor, the word CREDIT on all sides, with everyone associated with the Thunder sprinting away in abject terror.
It’s easy to be pulled under by the rip current of this team’s joyful selflessness as it points itself toward a second straight NBA title, but where’s the fun in that? Time-honored, only-in-the-NBA accusations – friendly whistles, special star treatment for Gilgeous-Alexander – have helped fit the Thunder with a new crown: villains. But where’s the internal conflict, the friction, the intramural warfare that makes every great team great? The Thunder have anywhere from eight to 12 players who could be starters on other teams, so why are so many of them content to sublimate their egos for the betterment of this one?
“There’s a standard everybody here conforms to,” All-Star center Chet Holmgren says, “but I don’t think anybody who is brought in here has to make changes to themselves or how they go about things. Everyone has innate principles to their lives that we all share.”
Everything about this team seems engineered to combat cynicism. Games at Paycom Center take place in an atmosphere of extremely loud reverence. The near-continuous “OKC!” chant – often celebratory, occasionally exhortative, rarely pleading – seems to rise from the depths, starting innocently and climbing until it feels hallucinatory, almost religious. Each time a player enters the game for the first time, whether it’s Jaylin Williams as the first one off the bench or Nikola Topic as the last, is welcomed onto the court with a surge of pure joy, like a hug on the doorstep. Every moment seems infused with a sense of wonder: Yes, the fans constantly remind themselves, this is really happening.
The Thunder are positioned to win now and several nows in the future. Presti tore the team down in the post-Westbrook/Durant/Harden/George years and emerged with the current championship core (Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren, Jalen and Jaylin, Lu Dort) and a cache of future draft picks that might require a storage unit. The haul from trading Paul George to the Clippers in 2019 – “haul” being the required, legal term – has operated for the past seven years like a subscription placed on auto-renew: Gilgeous-Alexander plus five first-round draft picks, including a final comic twist: this year’s lottery pick, No. 12.
Gilgeous-Alexander, the presumptive repeat MVP and someone Daigneault describes as “surgically consistent,” tells me he approaches each day with the intent to “be professional, and don’t think you’re better than somebody because you’re better at some thing,” even if that *thing* comes with fame and money and access to so much high-end clothing that he regularly hosts “yard sales” at his home where teammates and friends can sift through the stuff he’s replacing and take what they want. Hartenstein spends so much time doing community service in Oklahoma City that the team’s community-service folks can’t keep up. Daigneault approaches personnel decisions with an African proverb in mind: The ax forgets, but the tree remembers. “When you have power or leverage, you’re the ax, just chopping away,” he says. “But they remember everything. The way I try to reconcile it is by remembering that this is their dream. They are the pride of their families, and everyone they grew up with is amazed they made it this far. They represent all those people, and that’s a very deep thing. I try to remember that, and honor that, with fairness and honesty.”
During the lengthy break between the end of the regular season and the first-round sweep of the Suns, Thunder players take turns doing the post-practice media sessions. There isn’t much news to uncover, and the conversations are notable for their lack of intensity, ranging from the local media corps singing “Happy Birthday” to Jalen Williams on his 25th to Daigneault leaning on the Thunder banner hanging from the wall behind him like a bear scratching against the base of a tree. Everything is in its rightful formation – the basketballs, the water bottles, the towels – and when reserve guard Isaiah Joe is asked to describe the team’s mindset, he says, “One band, one sound, and we all have a like mind like a beehive.”
Pat Riley studied the opposite of all this and called it “The Disease of Me,” an affliction whereby team success spreads a toxic strain of internecine warfare, with players resenting each other and thinking they could get more – more minutes, more attention, more money – somewhere else. Riley, in his book “The Winner Within,” listed seven warning signs that lead to one sad but inevitable conclusion: “The Disease of Me always results in the defeat of us.”
“We have a locker room that’s not only full of good guys, but guys you want to be around,” Holmgren says.
There’s a level of maturity at work here that is both admirable and genuinely mystifying among a group of wildly successful young men in their early- to mid-20s. They’re like an after-school movie version of an NBA team, the guys who would stick up for the bullied and find a way to get your cat out of a tree. When I suggest that Jalen Williams, the team’s second-leading scorer and third-team All-NBA player last season, could be the main attraction on 20 or so other teams, Gilgeous-Alexander politely interrupts and says, “It’s 29 if you ask me.” When I propose the same thought experiment to Williams, the man they call J-Dub points at Gilgeous-Alexander shooting on a hoop near us. “Shai’s personal success doesn’t hinder mine,” he says. “Him being great doesn’t stop me from being great.”
It’s enough to make you wonder what they’re hiding.