CLIP: Why the OKC Thunder are a LOCK to Win More Than 60 Games

0:00All right, Oklahoma City. 64 wins last year. 60 and a half is the win total. This team is won 60 plus wins in two straight seasons. And the year before that, I think they won like 58 wins so like right around there. Regular season juggernaut, but the 60 and a half number is so high. I don't know how high they could have made this number for me to be like, yeah, I just don't feel good. I went over on this. I just don't know. I had to go over. I couldn't feel good going under. I had to go over. What about you? Yeah, I hate doing this because not only did I go over but I think this is my lock. Wow. It's been a good for the lock to be on the edge of the barbell. You know what I'm saying? You don't want to generally speaking, if people are like, oh, this is going to be the best team in the league, there's a lot more ways they're probably not going to be number one. But to your point, they always are really good in the season. They went 64 last year, basically without Jalen Williams' all year. Like I know he ended up playing a couple of dozen games but he was horrible.

1:00So like, I think him coming back healthy is just such a huge, yeah, they lost some guys. You know, they lost Isaiah Joe, they lost Luke Dorke, they lost Wiggins, like, but like Joe and Wiggins were kind of in an out of the rotation anyway. Dorke is, it sounds like they were prepping for him to be on a ventral anyway because they need to make a room for Kason Wallace and AJ Mitchell. I don't think the depth on this team is bad. If Jared McCain now who's going to eat up a lot of that time too, like their depth is not actually worse than it was going into last season. They're getting Jalen Williams back healthier. Like I think Chet Holmgren's going to come in with a chip on a shoulder. He played great in the realist season last year and then had such a poor showing against women Yama. Like you know that's eating at him. Like he's a fierce competitor. He's going to come back hard. And on top of all this, like they have the third easiest schedule on the league. So like yeah, it's hard to get 60 wins. It's hard to get 60 wins three times in a row. But to me, this is as close to, Shay's always healthy, knock on wood, right? Like whenever Shay plays, they're unstoppable. I just don't see, I mean you always, it's always injury related. But I think if this team is as healthy as they have been

2:02traditionally, they hit this without Jalen Williams last year. Like you know what I mean? Helmetly, right? Like Jill and Williams misses basically to your point. Most all of last season for all intensive purposes. The year before that, Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hortonstein were available for like 20 games at the same time. Like they were missing both of those guys for most of the season. Exactly. Like they have missed key players. I would for the most part, you know, over the regular season last couple of years. And it just never matters. Yeah, one more. They were starting, they started 24 on one last year, right? So like, you're like, oh man, maybe like that 64 is just propped up because they were so crazy that first one. Well, that means that the rest of the season, they went 40 and 17, which projects out to 58 wins, right? And that's like them, as they were worse stretch was the last two, thirds. And they were still a 58 win team trying to integrate back a clearly still hurt Jalen Williams. So I, yeah, I think this is, this is a lock. I didn't have to think hard about this one at all. The only other team that I felt nearly as confident about was the rockets. I love this is your lock. Um, it feels like a lock, man. Like I, and there's a lot of, oh, second, April and these teams can't stay together.

3:04Look at the Celtics. Look at the thunder. And I'm like, wait, look at the thunder. Like they lost Aaron Wiggins. I like Aaron Wiggins. I love Ludoort a couple of years ago. Miss me on like, oh, these are the kinds of players teams should be able to keep. No, no, we have to, we have to also live in an NBA where you can't just keep the same team verbatim every single season. Like you do have to eventually let guys go. Some people would disagree with you on that, right? Like that's not, that's not how everyone feels. Well, they're wrong. So I like that sport. Like we live in a, like, okay, just get rid of the salary cap, then. Let's just be baseball. We'll just do it that way. And then the thunder are totally screwed. Um, this is their bench, even having lost three guys, AJ Mitchell, Jared McCain, case, uh, not case and was, AJ Mitchell, Jared McCain, Alex Cruz, O'Jalen Williams, Ade Marra, they brought back Kenrick Twilliams, they drive the Bennett Sturts, they still have Nikola Topitz just hanging around. Uh, Thomas Sorber, who I really, I liked more than Ade Marra in that, in their respective drafts, he's going to be back. This team's loaded, man, and they just have a lot of ways. So I write down wait for each of these teams.

4:05I go, how do they go over? How do they go under? And literally the only note I have is stay healthy ish for the thunder. That's it. Just stay healthy. If she stay healthy, they're going to win 60 games. It honestly doesn't matter what happens to anybody else. Yeah, and nobody's going to go and do a, a season predicting that she is going to, you know, Tara Miniscus or something, right? And miss most of the season, like you just don't make bets like that. So I'm going over, it's a good call for your lock. Quick history, uh, little tidbit here. Teams that have won 60 plus games in three straight seasons over the last 30 years. Can you guess there's two of them? Three straight years in the last. Three straight years of 60 plus wins over the last three decades. So it's like 90, 90. Was it Lakers? Nope. Sprout. I don't know if the spurs ever did it like the spurs. No, I don't know. I'm terrible at guessing at trivia games. Who is it? Jordan and Pippin's Bulls and the dynasty warriors with Kevin Durant. Yeah. Okay.

5:05That's it. Well, not with Kevin Durant, you know, first year where they broke the wins record in the next two years with Kevin Durant. Yeah. All time teams. So I looked at that and I was like, ah, I was open to the city there. And I'm like, yeah, they probably are. As a regular season team, they are probably right there with those teams. Yeah. I think what I think the case against too is like maybe in a league where every single team is trying to win. Maybe it's just impossible to win 60 games, you know, or close close to it. Like I think the one reason the one thing that we didn't talk about is like we know every game on the average, you can be a little bit harder this year just because there's not going to be four to eight teams that are purposely trying to lose. And it's possible that just like the cumulative effect of having to try harder for an extra 10 to 15 games a year adds up in terms of wear and tear adds up in terms of just like you're going to lose a couple more games because everybody's trying their best. You might have enough night and you can't just outtell everybody. So I do think like there might be just a new paradigm shift happening in the league where maybe going forward, you just can't win 60 games. It's just too hard. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but that is something that I'm going to be monitoring as the season goes on. Yeah.

6:06I mean, even then, OK, see one there game is by an average of an average of 11 points last year. Yeah. So instead of blowing teams out, maybe they just merely win normally.