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The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors have become something of a cautionary tale within the NBA. They are the only team in NBA history to win 73 games, but have become a bit of a joke because they couldn't seal the greatest season in league history with a championship. It's a shame if you give it any real thought.
Why does winning a championship actually matter? What is the championship besides an arbitrary goal that the league sets and an ending to a season? I would argue that a championship matters as a form of historical validation. It's a way for a team to say, "We were the best team that year and we have a trophy to prove it." But really think about a championship compared to what the 2015-16 Warriors did. Every season in NBA history has had a champion. Only one season, the 2015-16 campaign, included a 73-game winner. What those Warriors accomplished was far, far rarer. Yet it's derided because it wasn't accompanied by a more common achievement.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are not going to win 73 games this season, but they do have a chance to do something nearly as rare. The Thunder, as of this writing, are 64-12. That means they are six wins away from becoming the third 70-win team in NBA history. Take a look at their schedule. The next three games are, at least on paper, fairly difficult. On Friday, they travel to Houston to face the Rockets. Then they have consecutive home games against the Lakers.
These won't be easy wins, of course, but the Thunder will be favored in all three games so long as the majority of their roster plays. They are 1-0 against the Lakers this season and 2-1 against Houston. If they manage to make it through those three games unscathed, the path to 70 is clear. Their final three games come against a Suns team likely missing Kevin Durant followed by two tankers in Utah and New Orleans.
They are, at least for the moment, mathematically motivated to continue trying to win. They hold a three-game lead over the Cleveland Cavaliers for the NBA's best record, which could matter in determining home-court advantage in the NBA Finals, and Cleveland holds the tiebreaker through its superior conference record. That places Oklahoma City's magic number for the best overall record at four, and with Cleveland about to start a cupcake schedule stretch, there is still at least nominal pressure for the Thunder to win a few more games.
What we have here is a remarkably rare convergence of circumstances. We almost never reach April with a team mathematically capable of reaching 70 games. When we do, that team is usually so far ahead in the standings that it focuses entirely on rest for the playoffs. Even if the team goes all out, the scheduling stars don't align to give them easily beatable opponents. All of that has lined up for the Thunder. If they win three difficult games, they should probably want to win and then three easy games, which would be hard for them to lose, they get to 70. So that leaves a fairly straightforward question for the Thunder: Do they actually want to win 70 games?
It's a complicated question. They'd surely go for it if Cleveland hadn't dropped as many recent games as it had, and 70 was a necessary win total, but the Cavaliers have lost 15 times, so the Thunder only need to get to 68 wins to clinch home-court advantage in the Finals. There isn't an inherent advantage to winning 70 vs. 69, and the example Golden State set in 2016 showed the dangers of pushing for a record that doesn't ultimately affect the championship.
The situations are not perfectly analogous, mind you. Draymond Green, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson all ranked in the top 22 in the NBA in minutes that season when they probably didn't need to. Oklahoma City has been far more judicious when it comes to minutes. MVP frontrunner Shai Gilgeous-Alexander ranks 15th as of this writing, but no other Thunder player is in the top 50. That's partially due to injuries, but it's also the nature of their dominance. Oklahoma City has 50 double-digit wins. Thunder players have missed time due to injury, yes, but even when they're available, they don't play too many minutes because they don't need to. The Thunder are so deep and win so convincingly that they haven't needed to push their roster as far as the Warriors did. There's a risk associated with ever putting your players on the floor, sure, but the Thunder aren't going to lose in the playoffs because they got tired.
The idea of Warriors-esque ridicule deterring the Thunder seems a bit farfetched as well. This is a franchise that traded away its two best players with multiple seasons left on their contracts after winning 49 games. They were, for a brief period, the face of tanking in the NBA. They've dealt with skepticism and derision before. It doesn't bother them. If the Thunder fail to win the championship this season, nobody is going to suggest that their win total is the reason why. More likely, blame will be placed on their youth as the NBA's youngest team as well as their decision not to try to upgrade at the trade deadline. It helps that Oklahoma City doesn't invite scorn the way that the Warriors did. They don't employ anyone who trash talks quite like Green. Their owner isn't giving interviews in which he claims his team is "light years ahead."
If the Thunder elect not to seriously pursue 70 wins, it won't be for the reasons Golden State regrets doing so. The explanation will be simpler: They truly do not care about their regular-season win total, no matter how historic it might be. This notion is supported by practically every decision they've made since this rebuild began in 2019. Look back to 2023, for instance. At that point, the Thunder were in the middle of a Play-In race. Their games had genuine competitive stakes. Yet they remained cautious when it came to Gilgeous-Alexander's health, holding him out of a key game against the Hornets that they ultimately lost because of an ankle injury he'd been playing through. When asked after that game about the team's motivations, head coach Mark Daigneault explained that while making the playoffs would be nice, nothing would distract the Thunder from their process or long-term ambitions.
"I think if it is an outcome that is downstream of our process and the way that we're trying to do things it would be great because it would just be kind of a marker along the way, but it's not so important that it's gonna distract us from our way of doing things," Daigneault said of the Play-In Tournament at the time. "We need to bet on that, day over day over day, we've done that for two or three years. That's what's put us in a position to compete for the play-in, so for us to abandon that at this point would be hasty, and quite frankly, we need to double down on this mentality past this season. That's why we're doing what we're doing."
The Thunder won't intentionally toss a game just to avoid 70 wins, but their history suggests that they won't actively pursue that bit of history, either. Their sole ambition, it seems, is to win championships. They're not exactly alone in that regard. Championships are the primary motivator for most NBA teams. Pursuing 70 wins at the expense of rest carries risk to that pursuit. That will especially be true in the middle of this final six-game stretch when their second game against the Lakers forms a back-to-back with their matchup against Phoenix. Those two games would be an obvious occasion to rest players for the sake of maximizing those championship odds.
The Thunder are more than capable of beating any team in the NBA in a single game, even with only their bench available. They are that deep and that cohesive. Regardless of who plays, it is not guaranteed that they can win six straight or that they will lose to any single opponent, even with key players resting. It is just the likeliest, among the possible outcomes, that the Thunder rest key players, let the chips fall where they may, and ultimately lose at least one of their last six.
It wouldn't exactly be fair to call that a shame, but it is at least a minor disappointment. Championships are sacred and opportunities to win them are rare, but they aren't the only achievement that should hold historical weight. Doing something that only three teams have ever done should mean just as much, if not more than doing something that 78 teams have done. It's an incredibly meaningful achievement, one that any team should be proud of, regardless of what other achievements accompany it. Whether or not they get there may not be relevant to what happens in June, but speaking purely as a fan of the NBA, I hope they make an honest attempt to reach 70. There are more ways to matter historically than just to hoist the Larry O'Brien Trophy.
