For the third straight season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will finish as the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference.
For the second straight season, the Oklahoma City Thunder will finish with the best record in the NBA and have home court advantage for as long as they are playing.
All that came after the Thunder easily handled the Clippers on Wednesday night at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, 128-110. And those two stats above just begin to touch on what the Thunder have done:
• Oklahoma City is the first team with back-to-back best records in the NBA since the 2019-20 Milwaukee Bucks.
• OKC is trying to become the first team with back-to-back best records in the NBA and to win the NBA title since Michael Jordan’s Bulls in 1996-97.
• Only five other teams have had three or more consecutive seasons with a No. 1 seed — most recently the 2015-17 Golden State Warriors — and those five teams all won multiple NBA titles in that stretch.
• This was the Thunder’s 64th win. If they win one of their remaining two games, they will become only the third team with back-to-back 65+ win seasons, joining the peak Jordan Bulls and the Curry/Durant-era Warriors (again, teams that won multiple titles).
OKC didn’t coast into this, it has won 19-of-20 down the stretch. It also has reached these records despite its second-best player, Jalen Williams, only playing in 33 games this season due to injury (plus the team has faced a lot of other injuries, having guys in and out of the lineup). Part of why the Thunder have pulled this off is that, to a man, they have bought into what coach Mark Daigneault is selling: focusing on yourself, on short-term improvement, and if you do that the big picture will take care of itself.
“I think the first thing for us is just making sure that we’re taking care of our stuff,” Daigneault said the night before, when the Thunder beat the Lakers. “It starts with how we’re playing, the habits we’re trying to sharpen what we’re trying to get done. You go through the regular season, there’s different opponents every night that present different challenges, but it always starts between you and yourself.”
Oklahoma City will open the playoffs at home the weekend of April 18 against one of the teams that have fought their way out of the play-in (Phoenix, the LA Clippers, Portland or Golden State).
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