Will the Thunder shake off the nightmare ending to their title reign?

Someplace in Oklahoma Metropolis proper now there’s a entrance workplace that understands one thing the remainder of the league remains to be catching up on. Seventy-three wins isn’t a quantity. It’s a dare. And this yr the Thunder walked proper as much as it, put their hand on the door, and came upon the identical factor Dub Nation came upon a decade in the past. The file doesn’t simply check your expertise. It exams what’s left of you within the postseason.

Ten years in the past the Warriors ran a 73-9 season that no person has sniffed since, chasing historical past for six straight months whereas the entire league lined as much as see if the Dubs would flinch or crack. They finally fell quick within the when it really counted, when a 3-1 Finals lead evaporated towards a Cleveland workforce that pulled off a miracle, and each speaking head in America obtained to spend a summer time calling the best common season ever performed a punchline. No one remembers the 73 wins the way in which they bear in mind the collapse. That’s the tax people. Chase the ghost and when you don’t end the job, the ghost chases you again.

So when Oklahoma Metropolis opened this season 20-1, then 24-1, matching GSW’s tempo recreation for recreation a decade later, I’ll admit there was part of me that wished to see it occur. Not for them however for the dialog. Let someone else carry that weight for a change. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander did, standing at a podium in Vegas, telling reporters the file means one thing to him and his group as a result of successful issues “it doesn’t matter what type it seems like.” They fell in need of the file, however a minimum of had the concept of the repeat recent of their eyes. OKC responded the way in which champs do. They swept the Suns and the Lakers, rolling into the Western Convention Finals trying each bit just like the machine that was presupposed to run this entire league over for the subsequent 5 years.

After which, proper on cue, San Antonio confirmed up and ruined their back-to-back desires. Spurs in seven, Thunder’s Finals repeat bid buried earlier than the calendar even hit June, San Antonio marching on to face the Knicks for the entire thing whereas Oklahoma Metropolis packed lockers early for the primary time since they climbed this mountain.

I do know that feeling. Dub Nation constructed a statue to the 73 wins after which needed to watch someone else hoist the trophy that summer time too. So let me be the primary workforce from the opposite facet of this particular heartbreak to say it plainly: welcome to the membership no person needs a membership card for. You constructed one of the best common season we’ve seen since ours. You continue to walked out of the postseason owing greater than you gained. The home all the time finds a solution to accumulate on that sort of debt, and it doesn’t care what number of nationwide TV video games you gained alongside the way in which.

The Thunder don’t get to chase 73 wins and repeat titles and skip the half the place it humbles you. No one will get that low cost. We all know precisely how loud the surface noise will get once you’re one of the best workforce in basketball for the common season and in some way nonetheless be humiliated in the long run. It’s the worst sort of quiet, the one the place all the things you spent seven months constructing will get rewritten in two weeks.

However right here’s the opposite half of it: Stand up. GSW did. It took actual work and a full yr of individuals doubting whether or not that Warriors core nonetheless had a beating coronary heart in it, and so they got here again and buried the noise below a parade. That’s the one approach this story ever will get rewritten. Not by chasing a quantity. By going again to the mountain and ending the job the second time, when everyone’s already determined you may’t.

Show you’re the dynasty everyone thought you had been. Or fade into the background like all the opposite can be dynasties who had been uncovered as one and completed.