WAIT AND SEE
Patience required as OKC fans reach the seventh stage of grief
Sam Presti is preaching patience, and he’s starting to make some sense. Maybe that means we’ve reached the seventh stage of grief. Acceptance and hope.
No longer playing the what-if game. What if Patrick Beverley or Game 6 never had happened? What if the NBA hadn’t allowed its television contract to ferry Kevin Durant to San Francisco Bay? What if lottery luck hadn’t been all bad last spring?
That’s living in the past, man. Time to accept the truth. Our team is not going to win much. And that’s OK. That’s for the best.
The Thunder embarks on its 14th season Wednesday night in Salt Lake City, and it’s not going to be pretty. Beyond the individual development of a handful of players, I hardly see how the season can be interesting.
In gentler times, Opening Day had a certain mystique.
Opening Day meant baseball season had arrived. On the Oklahoma plains, that meant televised games on Saturday and box scores every day in the paper. It was too far to actually get to a game, in Kansas City or St. Louis or Houston. Even when the Senators moved to Arlington in 1972, that was a far piece. People didn’t travel like they do today.
But I read about the rhythm of a city that had a ball team. Almost every night for almost six months, the local squad would play a game that didn’t mean much on a grand scale but would provide the city with an emotional connection.
The advent of that half-year sojourn, the return of heroes, was cause for celebration.
Then the NBA came to Oklahoma City, and we experienced our own Opening Night. The launch of another halfyear odyssey, with three or four games a week that we could collectively experience.
And OKC was showered with blessings. Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Chris Paul, Paul George, Serge Ibaka, Steven Adams, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Giants were in our midst, playing unforgettable games and offering memories to last a lifetime.
We were spoiled. Now the giants mostly are gone. The games mostly forgettable. The memories slow to crystallize.
The Thunder is playing for the future. That means young players with big minutes. That means lots of losses. That means an eye not on the playoffs, but on the lottery listings.
That means reading the standings upside down. That means daily stops at tankathon.com. That means wondering not if rookie Josh Giddey will fire off a game-winning pass, but if he’ll be an elite player four years from now. Patience, it’s called. “Patience is an active activity,” Presti said at his tipoff press conference a few weeks ago. “It’s an active action because there’s opportunities every single day to do things that would short circuit your longer-term vision or plans.”
Presti wasn’t just talking to the people inside Thunder headquarters. He was talking to the rest of us.
Like me. I spent the previous off-season trying to figure out how Presti could trade Chris Paul for Ben Simmons, a phantom trade that worked out swimmingly for the Thunder. Had that deal been made, the 76ers would have an NBA championship and the Thunder would have had a kook on their roster.
Like you. One way to torpedo the Thunder master plan is to turn Paycom Center into a ghost town. Covid did that anyway last season. But if fans stay away from downtown ballgames long enough, if apathy eventually replaces the frenzy that for so long defined the Oklahoma City NBA experience, ownership could grow antsy.
I don’t think Clay Bennett and Co. would lose the faith, but you never know. Empty seats do crazy things to people.
Nothing about this is easy. Presti doesn’t want to lose. Mark Daigneault doesn’t want to lose. SGA and Luguentz Dort don’t want to lose. You and I don’t want the Thunder to lose.
But losing is the path to winning. That’s how the system works. Lottery picks are how a market like Oklahoma City prospers.
Presti admits it’s not easy. Losing and staying the course, without panic and desperation, is hard.
“It’s one of the reasons why a lot of people try to avoid it,” Presti said. “They don’t like to do it because, at the end of the day, it’s easier to talk about being competitive but not really trying to do the things that will get you to the top of the mountain, or at least figure out if you can
“The easiest thing to do is to kind of cloak yourself in this idea that you’re trying really hard but you’re actually doing things that make you mediocre. The hardest thing to do is to take a path of discipline, commitment, and aspiration.”
There’s nothing fun about it. The Thunder needs to lose. Hoping that an SGA buzzer-beater rims out, instead of falling in, is counter to our natures.
We remember those glorious nights of Durant and Westbrook and PG and CP3, when victory was paramount.
Victory can be paramount again, but it will take some time.
The good news — the hope, remember, that goes with the acceptance — is that the Thunder is further down the rebuilding road than most. Few teardown teams have restarted with a star like Gilgeous-Alexander. No teardown teams have restarted with a treasure island of draft picks, like Presti has assembled.
Maybe that spoonful of sugar will make this new reality go down a little smoother.
Building for the future. Losing to win. Watching games with an eye on talent development instead of the scoreboard.
Leo Tolstoy wrote that “the two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
Personally, I’d prefer Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. But patience will have to do as Opening Night arrives.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.