In the summer of 2020, Oklahoma City general manager Sam Presti made trades with 15 different NBA teams. It was time for a knockdown rebuild.
So, Presti went about putting the franchise back together — brick by brick — until foundational pieces started to emerge.
But with last year’s success, which saw Oklahoma City qualify for the play-in tournament, comes the temptation to put new flooring on top of old material or paint over wallpaper — rushing the finishing touches to fasttrack this rebuild.
For Presti though, this is a patient and methodical build that he has masterminded and will see through until the very end. That also means doing it the right way, even if it takes a bit longer.
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All-Star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has already cemented himself as one of the key pillars, with four years left on his $172 million maximum rookie contract extension he signed in 2021.
Josh Giddey, meanwhile, took another step in his development last season while Jalen Williams emerged as another key component of this talented, young Thunder roster.
Then there is Chet Holmgren, another potential pillar of this rebuild — and a 7-foot-1 one at that.
Add in the flexibility that comes with having 35 draft picks over the next seven years and this is a Thunder team that is in a position to take a big swing to compete now.
But outside of Gilgeous-Alexander being the central piece, is Oklahoma City actually close enough to confidently know what the best version of this roster looks like?
Presti certainly seems to think, at least for now, the answer to that question is no.
“A couple of things on this,” Presti said at media day when the topic of a potential all-in move was floated by one reporter.
“Obviously, I know this was going to be coming.”
That hardly comes as a surprise either for a general manager like Presti, who is as detailed in his responses to media questions as he is with his approach to Oklahoma City’s rebuild itself.
Presti is all about transparency and so when he is talking to the media he knows that — by extension — he is talking to the fans. And he wants them to feel a part of his vision.
So, he sits down — usually for over two hours — in both his pre-season and post-season interviews to give the Oklahoma City fanbase confidence in where this team is heading.
Not that he has to do that anyway after last season’s success. But with greater expectations comes the potential for Presti to divert from what got him and the Thunder here in the first place.
That won’t be happening though. Allow Presti to explain, with another one of his well thought out analogies of course.
“So I have thought about this question in a way to kind of put it into terms that isn’t dismissive because there’s no script here,” Presti added.
“We practice what we preach. We are open-minded, literally. But there’s a couple reasons why I think that particular topic is maybe not relevant right now.
“One, I used the example with the paint last year. You can’t buy the paint for your house that you haven’t actually bought. You don’t know where the house is. You don’t know where it’s situated. You don’t know what style it is. You don’t know how much paint you’ll need. So we don’t really know what we have right now.”
That is particularly true given Holmgren spent the entirety of what should have been his rookie season last year on the sideline with a Lisfranc injury.
How he fits at Oklahoma City and whether Giddey and Gilgeous-Alexander can find ways to co-exist as dominant ball handlers will again be important in dictating what this Thunder team’s ceiling is.
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“So to even say, it’s a very broad term ‘star’. Where? Who’s to say we don’t have a player that could be really good in that spot already?” Presti went on to ask.
“We don’t know the answer to that, right? I don’t know. So we may not, I mean, the chances are, it’s really hard to find those players.
“We have one of them. If there happens to be one or two or more on the roster… we’ve really got fortunate.”
Although that is also where things could get tricky for Oklahoma City as it looks to both consolidate its roster in the present while also planning for the future.
You see, Gilgeous-Alexander — who is slated to enter free agency in the summer of 2028 — is already on his rookie max extension, which will see him earn just shy of $40 million in the 2026-27 season.
Soon attention will also turn to potential rookie max extensions for the likes of Giddey, Holmgren and even Williams should he continue on his upwards trajectory.
The new CBA though benefits a team like the Thunder that builds from within, rewarding franchises who draft and then later extend their own players.
On the other hand, as Yossi Gozlan of HoopsHype wrote, “teams with the most expensive rosters will have more restrictions that will limit their ability to add players from outside the roster”.
That is no big loss for Oklahoma City since attracting free agents has never been an easy task for a small market team like the Thunder anyway.
Plus, with one eye towards the future, Oklahoma City already went about using its cap space cleverly to take on unwanted contracts this summer while acquiring more draft assets in the process.
Take the decision to absorb the $17 million contract Davis Bertans is owed this season in order to move up on draft night to select guard Cason Wallace.
It was a shrewd move from the Thunder, with Bertans only guaranteed $5 million in the 2024-25 season.
As for the $17 million price tag he carries this season, the new CBA incentivises teams to reach the salary cap floor by the first day of the regular season and punishes those who don’t.
In other words, it was part of the $30 million in salary cap space Oklahoma City had to spend anyway and the Thunder made it count too in bolstering their plans for the future.
Which brings us back to Giddey.
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Externally, there have been conversations as to whether he could be the odd man out in what Oklahoma City is building.
“It’s a little early and they don’t have to wait until the 2026-27 season when some of the big contracts come up but you can bet they’re thinking about it and maybe the cap is going to go up a lot every year which will make it a little easier,” ESPN’s Zach Lowe, who recently named Giddey as one of the most intriguing players in the NBA this season, said on his podcast.
“I may be overthinking it, I’m obviously way ahead of my skis on just making these decisions and they don’t have to make any decisions any time soon.
“But the guy I keep thinking about and keep watching and keep an eye on as like, ‘Is this going to be the guy that is going to be the centrepiece of the big trade where they consolidate some of these guys into maybe a veteran who helps them’ is Giddey.
“I know I have my ball-handler, number one guy in Shai, I love Jalen Williams who is going to be a secondary ball-handler, Chet plays a position where if he hits he’s obviously going to be part of my core.
“Giddey is just one of those guys who shot 32 per cent from 3 last year, got better, knows how to pick his spots to push the ball in transition… and he’s a great passer and great rebounder and just kind of picks his spots to impact the game more than you would expect for someone who ‘needs the ball’ and ‘is a minus shooter’.
“He finds a way to make a positive impact. I find myself thinking about him a lot and his future on the team.”
Any major consolidation trade for the Thunder is unlikely to happen this season as Oklahoma City instead tries to work out its core group of players to build around in the long-term.
Once that happens, the Thunder will then be in a position to decider whether to push all their chips in.
As for who they could target, that will largely remain up in the air given it is more of a question for the future.
“Right now there’s not a rational case for going all in and making a big move,” Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer said on ‘The Bill Simmons Podcast’.
“But there could be once we have a better idea of what we actually need. I think that idea is going to come January or February and whether they make a move or not depends on who’s available.
“But I’m pretty sure when you look at this roster you could pretty clearly say adding maybe a star, scoring wing or big, beefy centre next to Chet Holmgren is pretty clearly what this roster needs because they don’t need much else at all.”
Of course, all eyes across the league will also continue to be on the situation in Philadelphia and whether Joel Embiid grows impatient should James Harden be dealt elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Luka Doncic and Zion Williamson are younger superstars who could potentially be on the move in the coming years if things don’t break right in Dallas and New Orleans.
O’Connor floated Wendell Carter Jr., Robert Williams III and Jarrett Allen as other players OKC could try trade for depending on how the team fares this season.
Simmons, meanwhile, mentioned Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Karl-Anthony Towns and even former Thunder star Paul George.
As for Giddey’s position in all this, Andrew Schlecht — host of the Down to Dunk and OKC Dream Team podcasts — argued the Australian is closer to “untouchable” than a potential trade piece.
A lot of that comes back to how Giddey fits into Oklahoma City’s team-building philosophy, with his high character traits off the court and the positional versatility he offers on it.
“Giddey is such an interesting player because I think he helps them get into the kind of offence that they want to run more than almost anybody,” Schlecht said on the Down to Dunk podcast.
“This is a conversation I’ve had lots of times with lots of people, that ‘Hey, Giddey might be the guy to go’ and a lot of it is he’s such an unusual player that a lot of people don’t know what to do with him.
“They think, ‘OK. I know Shai [is] an All-NBA guy, he’s the guy. We’ve seen so many guys in the league that play like J-Dub does’. That’s easy for me to think in my head about this Thunder team with him and Shai as this dynamic duo in the backcourt. Chet is the big guy. “Giddey is this 6-8 point guard that doesn’t handle that well but is a great passer, he’s not a great creator for himself but he scores enough. I mean, 16-8-6 for a guy who is 20 years old is pretty wild and to go from shooting 26 per cent to 32 per cent from 3 is a pretty big deal. “He showed in that Pelicans game that he’s not afraid either. He’s ultra-competitive.”
It is something Australian basketball great Andrew Gaze saw in Giddey from an early age, although even he admitted to being surprised at how quickly the 21-year-old has established himself in the NBA.
“I think we’ve all been a little surprised at if we’re to be brutal about it,” Gaze told foxsports.com.au.
“I think we all knew that he was going to have an impact and he was going to be a long-term pro when he had the potential to be a very good player at the NBA level. But I don’t think any of us assumed that it was going to happen this quickly.
“For me, it made a bit of sense because working with Josh from the time he was Under-12s, he’d always showed the ability to play to the level.
“So even if he was Under-12s and he might have been either practising or filling in for someone in the Under-16s or playing up a division or whatever it might be, it was always one where you don’t really notice it because of the way in which he can adapt and his basketball IQ and his maturity and the way in which he plays.
“I’ve certainly seen that right throughout his junior career. But you always sort of wonder whether that would translate when you get to the absolute uber elite, which is of course the NBA.
“Similar to what I’ve seen throughout the juniors, we’ve seen in the early stages of his NBA career where he’s able to make these adjustments and I think he’s exceeded most people’s expectations of what he’d be capable of doing.”
For Giddey though, taking another step in his third season will require making even more adjustments — and that is not isolated to continuing to improve his outside shot.
Instead, just as important to Giddey’s development will be his finishing at the rim and it is something the 21-year-old is cognisant of, admitting he has previously settled for too many floaters.
“I wanted to make a heavy emphasis on putting pressure on the refs to blow the whistle and get me foul calls and getting to the free throw line,” Giddey said at media day.
“My first two years that was something I struggled with, was getting to the line a lot. I think I settled for a lot of floaters and a lot of short shots in the mid-range area as opposed to getting all the way to the rim and forcing the ref to make a call.
“That’s something that this year I’m putting an emphasis on, not settling for floaters and mid-range shots and getting to the rim. Getting to the free throw line is something I need to get better at and something I spent a bit of time at the World Cup trying to improve on.”
Gaze had a front row seat as that side of Giddey started to emerge in Okinawa, consistently getting into the paint and wreaking havoc in a match-up with Japan’s smaller guards.
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“I think that when you’re playing against Japan it’s probably not a classic example of what you’re going to face [in the NBA] because they don’t have the same size to go up against,” Gaze said.
“But in general, even at the NBA level, when he’s playing against guards and he is the primary guard on the OKC team, that’s going to be his strength.
“You’ve got a guy that is 6-foot-8 and can get to the rim and get to the paint because of his ball-handling skills and how he can finish, in particular in the NBA when the defences for a lot of the periods are not allowed to be in the paint to come and meet you.
“Now they can obviously adjust when you’re driving, but it does give you a little bit more of an advantage to be able to exploit that size because you just can’t block a big guy in the paint and wait for someone to come in there and meet you.
“So I think it’s going to be an asset for him throughout his entire career because of his skillset which he has right now. He’s got good touch around the rim, he can get to the basket.
“He’s a lot more athletic than I think a lot of people give credit for and when he gets into the paint, he can finish over the top of defences, which was evident clearly in that game, but also in some of the other games that we saw as well.”
If Giddey, who made 62 per cent of his attempts at the rim last season, can improve that area of his game and become more of an outside threat it will go a long way to answering the most important question in determining which direction Oklahoma City goes next.
That, of course, being whether Giddey is the ideal backcourt partner for Gilgeous-Alexander.
Giddey has consistently told media that it will take time as the pair learning how to complement each others’ playing style and fortunately the Thunder have shown no signs of growing impatient in that regard.
Although given the high level Gilgeous-Alexander is playing at and the treasure trove of assets Oklahoma City has at its disposal, a major move is not out of the realm of possibilities.
For Schlecht though, instead of breaking up the core quartet he believes the Thunder are well-positioned to use their draft capital to build around what OKC already has on its books.
“When I think about a potential trade, I still think there’s a good shot those four guys are going to be the four guys on the team and then they can use their picks to have cheap roster spots where they can sign minimum guys or whatever they need to do,” he said.
“I would tell people to slow down just a little bit on Giddey because I think this thought is pretty common… I kind of think of him as a little bit untouchable to be honest.
“I just think he plays exactly the way they want him to play and he rebounds like a maniac. They are going to be a little smaller and his rebounding and his toughness is something they are going to need.”
