What's With You People and the Oklahoma City Thunder?

The Thunder Are Breaking Basketball (Legally)

It’s common knowledge that small markets get ignored, but the Oklahoma City Thunder sure are hotly debated in the NBA world. Last playoffs I wrote an article in response to HoS friend Kevin O’Connor asking, “Why does everyone hate OKC?”

Personally, I happen to like OKC. I’m so impressed with what they’ve built from the ground up. I’m a fan of Shai Gilgeous Alexander’s mantra of, “My whole life is consistent.” I’ve actually been thinking about the phrase a lot of late in regards to my own life. Can I be more consistent? What would the compounding effects of that be? But that’s not the point of this post. Instead it’s the emergent populist angst over that small market power in the plains.

In these playoffs, the complaints against the defending champions have grown louder, especially on apps that incentivize heated debates. To quote Andy Bailey of Bleacher Report:

My algorithm is ~60% people complaining about the OKC whistle right now.

Bailey also said the following (plus a lot more):

I understand why it annoys Thunder fans, but their most common responses (”why would the league rig things for small-market OKC?!” and “look where we rank in free-throw attempts!”) misses the point. The reaction is more about the difference in the way the Thunder are allowed defend and the way their opponents are.

There was a flashpoint in this discourse after Devin Booker received an absurd technical foul against the Thunder on Wednesday. Booker was bumped out of bounds by OKC wing Jaylin Williams, and the Suns star tossed the ball backwards before he stepped over the line. The ball hit Williams, not especially hard, and Thunder guard Alex Caruso appeared to direct referees towards punishing Booker, which stunningly worked. After the game, Booker said:

In my 11 years, I haven’t called a ref out by name, but James [Williams] was terrible tonight through and through. It’s bad for the sport, bad for the integrity of the sport. People are going to start viewing this as a WWE if they’re not held responsible.

It just feels disrespectful. I know I haven’t won a championship in this league, but I have been in it for 11 years now. So to get to this point to be treated like that, for me to even be saying something out loud, it’s bad.

James Williams clearly made a terrible call, but the NBA had to take action against the incendiary nature of Booker’s criticisms. The tech was rescinded (actually, all three technical fouls against the Suns that night were wiped out) but Booker was fined. The whole incident could be dismissed as pretty random, but it fit into a building sense among opposing fans that the Thunder get to play by different rules.

From Subscriber Clint:

Not sure if you are going to write about this, but everyone I know in my very limited set of friends who still watch the NBA (it is honestly down to < 5 people, most of whom are degenerate gamblers) *HATES* the Thunder.

We all have a natural inclination to root for David against Goliath, and the Thunder are Goliath, so that probably fuels the hate, but the disparity in how the refs treat the Thunder on offense versus defense is absurd:

• They foul bait like hell on offense. Maybe that’s just part of the game now, so good for them for exploiting the rules, but SGA in particular does it to a pretty extreme degree.

• Their best offensive players (SGA, J-Dub) rely very very heavily on off-arm shoves. Your guy Nate Duncan has talked about how the NBA needs to get rid of these, and I agree with him. SGA can basically shove defenders off of him, but then if they come close to touching him he collapses and gets a call almost every time. Again, maybe this is technically within the rules and if the refs are going to call it this way, good for them (I guess?) for exploiting it. But if you played this way in a pickup game in the playground when I was in high school, people would have laughed at you for calling a foul and the off arm stuff would have resulted in a fight.

• They hold and play super physically on defense. Caruso and Dort in particular are constantly fouling everyone. The mentality seems to be “they can’t call every foul!” Again, if they can get away with it, “good for them,” but it makes the product horrible and people hate the Thunder.

• There were numerous instances in crunch time of the final last year when SGA clearly traveled and wasn’t called.

SGA I think is the best guard since Kobe and may surpass Kobe in a few years, but I don’t blame people for finding his game and his team gross.

NBA media, on the other hand, seems to like to carry water for the NBA and any time I listen to a podcast and people (e.g., Hoop Collective) talk about the Thunder, I feel like they’re trying to gaslight me into thinking this isn’t a problem. They point out that all good scorers get to the line a lot (true, and many of them are also huge foul baiters, although others are super physical and I think earn the FTs more than SGA does), but they never address the dichotomy between how the Thunder are called on offense versus defense, or how SGA gets away with traveling and extreme off-arm shoves.

I love the NBA and will watch almost every second of every game in the playoffs, but I have come to deeply sports-hate the Thunder, who I think are a great team and don’t need this BS to be great. I hate them so much that I will actually root for the *Lakers* against them LOL.

I don’t know if you’d ever write about this, but you obviously cover the NBA and media a lot and I think this is another example of the media not getting the fan perspective and treating us like idiots. :)

First off, I like this topic because there’s a perceived unfairness absent serious conspiracy theory underpinning it. This is so rare in the Internet age. While a bunch of people are livid at OKC for getting a purported advantage from the NBA, nobody (or very few) believe that Adam Silver literally wants to contrive their success.

From the Thunder perspective, the idea of NBA assistance would seem absurd. The 2023 CBA, pitched as a bulwark to big market dynasties, is now a hindrance to what Sam Presti has painstakingly built. Obviously, the league and its broadcasters much prefer bigger market teams dominate the NBA than this group of mostly quiet kids in Oklahoma. This is like if the early 2000’s Sacramento Kings absorbed the sort of ref backlash that the early 2000’s Lakers did. What an unexpected situation we find ourselves in.

Here’s what I think is really going on and I harken back to my Did Nerds Ruin the NBA? post. Oklahoma City is an extremely savvy, professionally run outfit that keeps diligent track of both NBA rules and NBA trends. Adam Silver’s poorly run league is somehow both exactingly literal and maddeningly arbitrary. There are market inefficiencies within this paradoxical mess.

In the Sports Gambling era, refs are terrified out there. Since every choice is subject to painstaking retroactive review, they timidly call games according to the letter of law versus the spirit. The Thunder understand the benefits of literalism (the push off is never a foul), and the benefits of arbitrary grey zones (forms of contact on defense can be ignored as “incidental”).

The spread of basketball nerdom has gone on too long because the league is run too nerdily. What I mean is, Adam Silver’s NBA is so squeamishly deferential to rules as to submit authority to them. In the old NBA, a veteran ref like Joey Crawford had plenary power to call games according to his view of basketball. Players had to respect the whistle, and maybe stop flopping if Joey was sick of it. Now, with standardization pressure coming from legalized gambling, every morsel of the sport must be legislated according to the book. Lengthy replay reviews have been added just in case human “error” takes place. Players have taken so much advantage of Rule Authority that a lot of the modern game now can be construed as legal cheating. When only the “rules” are in charge, then nobody truly is.

Modern referees aren’t always certain on what a foul is, because there will always be contact in this non contact sport. They are, however, clear that the controversial “shoulder bump” is legal. The Thunder have optimized by taking advantage of what happens and doesn’t happen out there between the lines. The refs act with little authority, so you’re incentivized to push certain limits. You can hate OKC for it, and many apparently do, but I don’t believe the Thunder are beneficiaries of bias. Instead, I’d argue, that they’re just more wise to what’s wrong with the sport.