Why the Oklahoma City Thunder are America’s Team

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America’s NBA team is playing on Tuesday night in Las Vegas. I’m convinced the reason you don’t know them as America’s Team is because they haven’t been properly marketed. I just don’t see any other plausible reason.

I’m talking about the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same team that was somehow not selected among the 10 headliners to play on Christmas Day. The same team that is scheduled to be on national TV fewer times this season than the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Oklahoma City Thunder — a finalist in the NBA Cup championship game — should be an American sensation, yet it feels like they’re preposterously underexposed.

This needs to change. The NBA should put every single one of their remaining games on national TV. Here are five reasons why:

1. They are really good at basketball. Historically good.

The Thunder are 20-5 in the Western Conference which is like 25-0 in Eastern Conference currency. They have outscored opponents by 12.1 points every 100 possessions, which is the best net rating in the league and almost two full points better than the Boston Celtics’ 10.2 figure.

But that doesn’t even give OKC its proper due.

To get a better idea of how good this OKC team is, we have to adjust for strength of schedule (i.e. they don’t get to play in the East). We can do that by looking at Simple Rating System (SRS), which accounts for opponent strength and can be found on Basketball Reference for every team dating back to 1946. The Thunder’s SRS stands at 11.94, which means they are about 12 points better than the average team, widening their aforementioned lead on Boston, which sits at 8.72 because of the schedule variable. The team with the best record in the NBA, the Cleveland Cavaliers, sits at 7.44.

Even with Chet Holmgren out for the majority of its games, OKC is lapping the competition. Through this prism, the distance between the Thunder and the Cavs is roughly the same as the Cavs and the Miami Heat, who are struggling to stay above .500.

But to fully understand how good this OKC team is, we can look at the number of teams who have finished a full season at an 11.94 SRS.

Here’s that…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/why-the-oklahoma-city-thunder-are-americas-team-151733527.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-12-17 15:17:00

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