The Thunder Are Mortal

The bad thing about the NBA regular season is that it's too long. The good thing about it is that it's long enough for rich, intriguing storylines to develop. Consider the case of the best team in basketball.

One month ago, the dialogue around the Oklahoma City Thunder centered not on their chances of repeating as champions, the certainty of which was already established as a discursive given, but on whether they could mount a serious assault on the 2016 Golden State Warriors' mythic 73-win season. The latter is the most difficult team accomplishment in basketball, and yet it still wasn't a heretical topic, because the Thunder had so completely dominated the first-third of the NBA season, posting a 24-1 record, a plus-17.2 net rating, and a defense so good that the gap between itself and the second-best unit (7.4 points per 100) was wider than the gap between second place and 24th.