EACH BASKETBALL IS perfectly aligned on each rack in the Oklahoma City Thunder's practice facility, one continuous WilsonWilsonWilsonWilson shelf after shelf. The water bottles and sports drinks in the refrigerators are aligned with the same precision, label out, so straight you can imagine someone standing before them, one eye nearly closed, assessing each one as if judging its moral rectitude.
But the sweat towels hit the hardest. The towels are where metaphor begins to blur and a mission statement comes into focus. Each towel has eight blue stripes along one side, and each towel is folded identically and stacked on a shelf with those eight blue stripes lined up like battle-ready battalions. Their utility is so pragmatic and yet the display speaks to something far more important.
The NBA champion Thunder, under general manager and interior designer Sam Presti, are attempting to create a system where function follows form, and success is the natural byproduct of its environment. The Thunder are, in more ways than one, the team of our moment. The world outside is unpredictable, tenuous, fraught. The ground shifts without warning. Truth has become subjective, reality distorted, the next hellish turn never more than an unlocked phone screen away.
Inside this cocoon -- ThunderDome is tempting, but too easy -- the chaos of the world has been engineered out of existence. For seven straight days in mid-April, through 85-degree days and days with sheets of rain and days with breathless tornado warnings, I made a note that the lush, weedless lawn that surrounds the parking lot remained the exact same length, as if a crew arrived late at night armed with rulers and scissors to trim each blade individually. Every player arrived on the court with his shirt tucked and left the same way. The overall vibe was high-end Stockholm showroom, one that would undoubtedly be curated and overseen by someone who looks, cinematically at least, a lot like Presti.
This hypnotic consistency, an extreme rendition of "control what you can control," is central to the Thunder's quest to become the first team since the 2017-18 Warriors to repeat as champions. The Thunder have swept the Suns and the Lakers in the first two rounds of the playoffs, and they enter the Western Conference finals as favorites to bring another parade to the wide and mostly quiet streets of downtown Oklahoma City.
Is it possible to create the perfect basketball ecosystem? If you line everything up just right, personalities and talents and towels and basketballs, will the product on the court inevitably become as pure and consistent as its surroundings?
"There are all kinds of constraints," coach Mark Daigneault says. "There's a constraint on minutes, there's a constraint on roster spots, there's a constraint with the salary cap. They know I only have so many minutes. They know I can only start five guys. They're smart; they get it. But there's no constraint on the investment you can make when they come in the building every day and making sure you deliver a first-class experience to every single player every single day."
Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein and I are having a conversation in the courtside chairs in the practice facility when he notices a basketball on the rack near us as ever-so-slightly off-kilter, its Wilson logo tilted at most 10 degrees. Hartenstein points at the offending ball and says, without a hint of sarcasm, "That'll be fixed before we finish talking." He is nearly right; as he walks across the court toward the locker after we are done, an equipment manager comes by. He tilts the rogue ball back into place by putting a hand on each side, as if cupping an injured bird.
You can almost feel the entire building heave an exhausted sigh of relief.
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.
YOU CAN ONLY be the fresh new face once. After that, everyone starts to pick at the seams, trying to find the one loose thread that'll lead to the unraveling. And so the Thunder find themselves as the target of the unique scrutiny -- and conspiracy talk -- that comes with being the NBA's best. The problem is, this organization is so clinical in its excellence that most of the charges come across as sputtering and impotent, much like the nonstop, carotid-popping rages of the Lakers' Austin Reaves throughout the Western Conference semifinals. But in the interest of pith-helmeted investigation, here goes: The overriding complaint, best as we can figure, is that the Thunder do the exact same stuff everybody else does, only better.
They get every break from the referees, critics claim, because the team's image as a happy, mostly uncomplaining and egalitarian operation -- "They all cheer for each other, always," Daigneault says -- has seeped into the collective brains of NBA officials. This theory's most obvious personification is Gilgeous-Alexander, who is said to dramatize the slightest bit of contact and, therefore, shoots too many free throws. Chants of "Free throw merchant!" began last season in Minnesota and spread. He shot the second-most free throws in the NBA this season, which seems reasonable for a guy who takes more than 19 shots per game, scores more than 30 and relies heavily on driving through seams and creating space for his midrange shooting. At worst, the charge would be classified as a low-level misdemeanor: doing what every player tries to do, just doing it better and more frequently than anybody but Luka Doncic.
"My favorite part is watching him handle it," Daigneault says. "He's unflappable. It doesn't bother him. He puts it in its proper place by framing it as something that comes with the territory of being great."
It's difficult to describe the way Gilgeous-Alexander moves on the court without sounding weird or waxing poetic. He is slight but strong, with long limbs that seem to expand as the situation demands. His body is capable of slicing through the air and choosing its path based on what his mind senses, like a form of echolocation. In the second half of Game 1 against Phoenix, he put a move on Devin Booker that lent itself to poetic weirdness. He drove into the lane, sending Booker into an oh-no backpedal, and then performed a double crossover -- first to the right, then to the left -- that was as awe-inspiring as it was gratuitous. (One crossover would have been plenty.) He then left his feet, switched the ball from his right to his left hand in midair and finished with a spinning flick off the glass from the left side.
It was the kind of move that Gilgeous-Alexander performs as a matter of routine. It was the kind of move that calls to mind the Bruce Lee dictum, "Be like water making its way through cracks." It was the kind of move that makes it hard to decide what is more impressive: that a mind could think it, or that a body could perform it.
"People don't actually know what they're watching with Shai," Jalen Williams says. "They just see numbers and don't understand the experience. I wish everyone could sit courtside once in their life just to watch what he does."
As villains go, Gilgeous-Alexander is among the world's least imposing, especially as he tries to explain the alleged heel turn he has taken by simply doing something everyone tries to do.
"It's fun to me," he says. "The way I see it, the fans, the people that watched the games and root against us, they want their team to win. You will never hear an Oklahoma City Thunder fan complaining about my free throws. You will never hear a Lakers fan complaining about LeBron or Luka's free throws."
He shrugs, laughs and holds his massive hands in front of his chest.
"I get it, guys," he says. "I would hate me, too."
DAIGNEAULT IS TALLER and sturdier than he looks on television, where he is most often shown standing near half court, arms crossed, jaw working double-time on an ill-fated hunk of gum, eyes tightened in a quizzical squint that gives the impression of a man attempting to look through the game and not just at it. There is also an element of detachment at work; the game is happening out there in front of him, and he's theoretically in charge of half of the men playing it, but the look on his face and the squint in his eyes makes it clear he understands how little of it depends on him.
His career path was wildly random, like a GPS malfunction. He went from a student manager for Jim Calhoun at UConn to an assistant's job at Holy Cross, then another assistant's job at Florida. He was the head coach of the G League Oklahoma City Blue for five seasons before becoming a Thunder assistant and then its head coach in 2020, when he was 35 years old.
"I used to say if you replayed my life a million times, it would only happen this way once," he says. "And now I get to coach this kick-ass team, so now it's like 1 in 100 million times. The whole thing's crazy. There's no part of me that's not completely blown away by how I ended up in this situation."
His style, according to his players, can be described as situational autonomy. He gives them the loose framework of what they need to do -- deny the pass, say -- and leaves it up to them to figure out how to employ their individual skill set in pursuit of that goal. In other words, he understands that Hartenstein and Jalen Williams will set out to achieve the same goal in vastly different ways. It's what made Alex Caruso a cult hero in last season's playoffs for the way he denied Nikola Jokic the ball in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals. He was given a simple mandate -- don't let him get the ball -- and he succeeded by doing whatever his 6-foot-5 body could do against the massive Jokic: crouch in front of him, climb onto the sides of him, claw and scratch and fight from every angle. It's part of the Daigneault meritocracy. It's why Jared McCain can linger at the end of the bench for the entire first round and then become a low-level cult hero of his own with 18 points in 18 minutes while SGA sits with foul trouble in Game 2 against the Lakers.
"Coach will literally not play you for an entire series and then put you out there for Game 1 in the next one," Gilgeous-Alexander says. "That's why I tell guys, 'Treat every game like Game 7 and they're about to beat us.'"
Nowhere is the Thunder's chemistry more evident than when the other team has the ball. OKC plays the kind of defense that would work well in a horror movie. It happens two or three times a game: The court contracts, the sidelines and baselines closing in like false walls. They swarm, and there's no room to move. You get around one guy only to be met by two more. There are five bodies but, improbably, 20 sets of hands, and before you can call timeout they've scored 12 straight.
It starts in the time it takes for someone -- Devin Booker or Dillon Brooks in the first round, LeBron James or Austin Reaves in the second -- to dribble innocently into the sea of arms and legs. The ball is deflected and the Thunder are off, all five of them, as if responding to an alarm they alone can hear. It builds, too, possession after possession, basket after basket, just like the "OKC" chant, and it ends only when they decide to end it.
In the first quarter of the first game of the four-game sweep of Phoenix, a steal led to a fast break that went from Holmgren to Jalen Williams to Hartenstein for a dunk, and 40 seconds later, Jalen Williams -- with his slightly stooped shoulders and a face that looks like it's still in fifth grade -- stripped the ball from Jalen Green near midcourt, glanced over his shoulder to see nobody chasing and windmilled a dunk while the building shook. Those two plays helped to create a 15-2 run that effectively ended the game and, for all intents and purposes, the series.
And it exemplified one of Daigneault's many credos:
"The outcome is important. The way it happens isn't."
SO MANY CHARACTER actors, so many subplots. Eight straight wins in the playoffs, more than six of them without Jalen Williams and his injured hamstring, have pushed the Thunder bench players into the spotlight. Ajay Mitchell, taking Williams' minutes, averaged 22.5 points in the sweep of the Lakers. Jared McCain, taking Mitchell's minutes, had 18 points in 18 minutes in Game 2 against Los Angeles.
Backup center Jaylin Williams -- known as JWill -- is perhaps the most outwardly grateful player in NBA history. In the rare moment when he is not smiling, it's usually because he's busy positioning his body to take a charge, something he does better and more often than any big in the NBA. And when he says, "I came from nothing," he means an 800-square-foot house in Fort Smith, Arkansas, sharing a dream with his father. Michael Williams recorded Jaylin whenever he had a basketball in his hand: AAU games, school games, even playing 21 with his cousins. Jaylin says his father drew some Division I interest as a player coming out of Fort Smith's Northside High School -- which improbably counts Thunder teammates Isaiah Joe and Jaylin Williams as alums -- but had to set aside his dream to go to work and help his family.
After each of Jaylin's games, even 21 in the yard, Michael would sit with his son and review high-level concepts such as positioning and spacing. He taught his son not only how to take a charge, Jaylin's specialty, but how to anticipate when and where it should happen. "We'd sit in the living room and he would show me clips on his phone," Jaylin says. "You should have been here. When he goes there, you go here. Having him walk me through those moments helped me be the player I am."
Michael Williams texts his son before every game: Love you, son. Be aggressive and shoot your shot if it's there.
And after nearly every game they go through the same routine: Michael will pull out his phone if they're together in Oklahoma City, or he'll FaceTime Jaylin if the Thunder are on the road. Michael will point the phone at the clips he has recorded on his television and sometimes put a kitchen chair or two in the middle of the room to play the role of Jaylin's opponents. "He thinks he's in the NBA," Jaylin says.
Jaylin Williams has some of the best basketball minds in the world teaching him the intricacies of the game, but there he is in a hotel room somewhere, watching his father turn kitchen chairs into imaginary defenders. He listens and nods along, sometimes capturing a screenshot for his own memories, and before he hangs up, he thanks his father and tells him he loves him. Is he ever tempted to tell his father he's got this?
"Nah," Jaylin says, flashing a smile that can cure the worst day. "It's how he shows his love."
TOO GOOD TO be true? You decide.
Hartenstein, Thunder employees will tell you, is the kind of guy who will get off a plane after midnight after a long road trip and wake up early that morning to volunteer at a food bank or a homeless shelter. One day at the City Rescue Mission, a shelter that is among the beneficiaries of the Hartenstein Foundation, the 7-footer noticed a little boy sizing him up before eventually approaching.
"Hey, I recognize you," the boy told him.
"Oh, yeah," Hartenstein said, trying to play it cool. "I'm Isaiah Hartenstein. I play center for the Thunder."
"No, no, that's not it," the boy said. "You were here at Halloween."
Hartenstein says he loves that story because it allows him to feel normal, just a guy volunteering his time and not a wealthy athlete trying to stay on the right side of karma. It also helps explain why he feels compelled to keep going.
Since the Thunder moved to Oklahoma City in 2008, Presti has made a trip to the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum a requirement for each new player and staff member. Presti often takes the player or staffer himself. Hartenstein's first trip to the memorial honoring victims of the 1995 federal building bombing stayed with him long after he left. "It changed the way I view giving back," he says. He returned three or four times, struck not so much by the devastation of the act itself but the kindnesses, both big and small, that came immediately after the ground stopped shaking and the walls stopped crumbling. Through his foundation, he produced a short documentary called "The Oklahoma Standard" that attempts to emphasize the acts of service and respect that followed the bombing.
It's in keeping with the theme of the lush grass and the perfectly aligned basketballs: Even the worst day in the city's history is an opportunity to isolate the dignity of the relief efforts from the outside acts that precipitated the tragedy.
I had been to Oklahoma City many times, but I'd never visited the memorial. Everything about it, from Timothy McVeigh's motivation to the horror of a bombed-out daycare center, felt like something I'd rather not revisit. Hartenstein encouraged me to go, telling me, "I think a lot of people talk about the tragedy behind it, but I think now people talk about what came out of it, how such a dark time turned to light."
I brought a notebook, just in case, and headed to the memorial two days before the 31st anniversary of the bombing. I was staring at a collection of photographs honoring the first responders and rescue workers, still slightly numb from listening to the audio recording of a meeting of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board that took place at the exact moment the Ryder truck exploded, when a woman next to me pointed to a photo of a group of aid workers sorting food. "That's me right there."
Dorothy Grimes arrived as a Red Cross volunteer less than 90 minutes after McVeigh's rented truck exploded, and she spent the next 15 days providing food and clothing to relief workers and loved ones awaiting word. This was her second trip to the memorial, and she was here because her great-grandson was learning about the bombing in his sixth-grade class and asked her to take him. He was sitting at a computer wearing headphones and clicking through the thumbnail biographies of volunteers such as his great-grandmother. Dorothy pointed to him and said, "I'm proud they're still teaching it. It's important that they learn what happened here."
She showed me another photograph of rescuers balancing on blocks of rubble as torn metal sheeting hung down from the floor above. The days after the bombing were rainy and windy, she says, and those metal sheets, like stalactites, swung in the air. "It was like wind chimes," she tells me. "You couldn't call it a melody because of what it represented, but it was eerie."
This is why Presti believes it's important that every member of the organization pays a visit, to see and hear and feel what so many of the people who fill their arena experienced 31 years ago. Grimes stood in silence, staring at the photographs on the wall.
"All these years later, it's funny what you remember," she says, her voice barely above a whisper. "That sound is something I still hear."
HOW DID THIS particular group of players converge in this time and place to give Oklahoma City an NBA title, with the promise of more? How did it become what Lakers coach JJ Redick calls "one of the greatest teams ever in NBA history"? This brings us back, inevitably, to the issue of credit; not who wants it, but who deserves it.
Toward the end of Holmgren's only year at Gonzaga, Presti made the trip to Spokane to watch the 7-1 forward practice. In Holmgren's mind, it wasn't a transformative moment. He was a big deal, projected to go no lower than third in the 2022 draft, and having a team executive show up to watch him play basketball had become like wallpaper.
But, as Holmgren learned later, Presti wasn't there to watch him play basketball. The basketball evaluation had already been settled, so Presti was there to perform his unique alchemy, to watch him be a human being, to see how he interacted with his teammates and coaches. He wanted to see how Holmgren's personality, not necessarily his game, would fit into the structure he'd built in Oklahoma City.
"As he's evaluating the player, Sam's really imagining that he's looking at them on the team," Daigneault says. "It's like method acting. He really goes deep. He's really trying to evaluate what the guy would be like walking around our building. One time we were discussing a player, and he said to me, 'All the guys are standing there watching film before practice, and I'm just imagining him standing there with them, and I just don't see him fitting in.' And that was it."
And as Gilgeous-Alexander says, "He's not wrong very many times."
At some point after Holmgren was drafted by the Thunder, Presti revealed the purpose behind his visit to Gonzaga. "I found out he wasn't paying any attention to anything having to do with basketball," Holmgren says. "I was still a kid, and I knew how I acted mattered for my future and where I wanted to be, but I didn't realize it had that level of impact. Now I know he was doing his Mr. Miyagi mind-reading routine on me. And apparently, I passed the test, so I'll just keep being myself."
Kenrich Williams distills the Thunder spirit down to three sentences: "Everybody says they want to win, but do you really want to win? Because if you do, you've got to put everything, from money to playing time, and set it aside. You've got to sacrifice it all."
Williams makes playing for the Thunder sound like the priesthood, which it most assuredly is not, but Daigneault is convinced that his players "are more willing to commit to the whole when they're convinced they're part of something special. They see that it's worthy of their commitment."
Challenges await. Victor Wembanyama and San Antonio loom, or Anthony Edwards and Minnesota loom, and perhaps the Knicks down the line. All that character and all those friendships and all that on-court chemistry will be tested once again. The playoffs are a long haul, and they're hard, and someone will no doubt be called upon to dig deep to come up with a unique way to reach an important outcome. But for now, Oklahoma City is the place where the ax coexists with the tree, the grass out front is always perfect, and the outside noise stays right where it belongs.