Behold a young homegrown contender built through the draft, with an MVP running the offense. They wield the best record in basketball. They’re the defending champions with a home crowd loud enough to register on seismographs. Everybody around the league is looking at them and asking the same question with varying levels of jealousy: is this the next dynasty?
That’s the 2026 Oklahoma City Thunder.
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It was also the 2016 Golden State Warriors, right down to the part where everybody started talking about them like the future before the future had actually arrived. The scary thing about becoming the next Warriors is that eventually you have to survive the part where the Warriors stopped being a great story and started becoming a problem. Saturday is that part.
Which remains one of the funniest and most horrifying events in modern basketball history, depending entirely on what zip code you lived in. Oklahoma City spent years building a contender, developed an MVP, assembled a legitimate title threat, pushed the Warriors to the absolute brink of elimination, and then watched their best player leave to join the people who had just beaten him. Imagine losing a sword fight and then finding out your shiniest sword filed paperwork to switch sides.
Oklahoma City has been trying to become the Warriors ever since.
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They won Game 7, walked away with Durant sixty-six days later, and turned his talent into two bonus championships that OKC spent a decade watching from a very uncomfortable distance. The Warriors went beyond winning the rivalry; they turned it into a modern day cinematic masterpiece of how to dismantle your biggest conference rival. That’s what the Thunder need to do Saturday to rise up the dynastic rankings. Now Oklahoma City can feel what the Warriors went through exactly 10 years ago. They’re the defending champions with the MVP, the home court, the banner, and the growing institutional confidence that the Western Conference belongs to them. This is usually the point where a dynasty starts stretching its legs and making everybody else miserable on a predictable schedule.
I have the…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/thunder-spurs-game-7-warriors-161334395.html
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Publish date : 2026-05-30 16:13:00
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