How to be the Thunder

Your team's too itchy

The Thunder just did something few teams have the patience to pull off. MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES

If you’re like most NBA fans, since watching the Thunder win the first of many titles in Sunday’s Game 7:

• You’ve been hoping your team can be like the Thunder.

• You hope the first step toward your better tomorrow is literally tomorrow, the first day of the 2025 NBA draft.

It’s not going to happen, because your team’s front office can’t keep up with Sam Presti when it comes to thinking long term. As Bobby Knight once said: “Everyone wants to win. But not everyone wants to prepare to win.”

What team has Presti’s ability to think long term? Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is a tough ol’ read, but for sure he deserved the Nobel Prize for teaching us how our brains work. In our human heads, our patterns of thinking tend to fall into one of two categories: quick, emotional, and in the moment or rational and reflective and over time.

We toggle through those modes. That’s how my brain works, that’s almost certainly how your brain works. And noticing the difference between thinking fast and slow can do a lot to help your team win games.

Which might sound weird.

Let’s begin on the inarguable bedrock of my argument: Sam Presti, the architect of the Thunder, is boring as paint. I kinda know him, but stopped calling or texting a decade ago because he can provide a journalist nothing but pleasantries, vagary, and evasion. Writing things that people like to read requires a certain degree of sparkle; which you can’t get from Oklahoma City. Maybe Presti’s secretly a blast in the vivid quickness of a party, but I suspect he’s never all that present, as his brain wanders to solving next year’s problems. I once heard a story about his calling the office several times from the beach of his vacation.

The fact is, Sam Presti can look you in the eye and not give two shits if he’s making life fun for you. And in the NBA, that precise quality made him the best. When Presti traded Paul George for a dynasty–the greatest trade in NBA history–mostly Thunder fans hated it. “Someone,” wrote a typical Twitter responder in 2019, “PLEASE FIRE SAM PRESTI.”

Paul George was making highlights right then, Presti pulled off a move that became RINGZ six years later. It felt like trading something for nothing; the very real star George for theoretical stars Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and picks.

But the future is funny and different from the present or the past. George joined a high-priced Clipper superteam, but only went deep in the playoffs once, never won a title, and left for the disappointing 76ers. Presti wasn’t trading George for nothing, he was trading thinking fast for thinking slow.

Presti retooled everything, taking as long as it took to solve every problem that kept the Thunder from contending. They identified what would win in the future and got those things. They were the only bidders for Mark Daigneault and became the team that most values shooting coach Chip Engelland. (It’s barely fair: the Thunder have Isaiah Hartenstein and an entire roster of 3-point shooters.)

My argument is not that thinking slow is better than thinking fast. My argument is you need both, and that as led by billionaires, and populated by athletes, NBA teams tend to be long on quick emotional thinking. The front office’s job is to be the cool-headed counterbalance. Not every team has that.

The Thunder do. Presti has barely changed his approach since he took over the Sonics in 2007. Assess the market, decide what works, develop a winning long-term strategy to contend on some schedule (while keeping the billionaire overlords from ruining everything by keeping the team cheap). Study the coaching staff, the playing style, the opposition, the trends, the future, the referees, the luxury tax, the second apron, and then–this is the hardest part–avoid the temptation of capsizing the long-term for the short. Don’t fall for ruses, don’t fall into traps, don’t blow all the cash.

Especially: Don’t be Mat Ishbia. I once wrote for Basketball Feelings about how the Suns’ billionaire doesn’t know a damn thing about thinking slow. He and his wife Emily did an awful job of reflecting, meditating, and figuring out what would make them happy in the future. First they fixed up a house in Michigan. Then they bought the neighbor’s house and tore both down, and built a modern mansion where they raised their kids. Then they tore that one down, and launched into a crazy new thing that combines eight houses with a lazy river, a climbing wall, and several sport courts. Before that was completed, though, Mat and Emily got divorced.

It’s going to be a wild ride, Suns fans. Ishbia’s well suited to what he did at the end of this season: he promised change. Bet on it. He is excellent at tearing down what he recently thought he wanted. Two years into running the Suns, Ishbia has lurched from one savior to the next, bookended by doing anything possible to get Kevin Durant into a Suns uniform and then doing anything possible to get Durant out of a Suns uniform. Bradley Beal was the toast of the town and then, as predicted by the rival executives who didn’t trade for him, almost instantly a burden. Coaches and GMs and governing philosophies spin like tops. Ishbia has paid such high prices for all these things that it’s hard to make the case the Suns have won a single transaction.

Honestly, in the sports world, where the fittest people win, the test of long-term thinking is often alcohol and party drugs. By and large, the road to becoming an elite athlete is to think slow and long term, to sleep and work out, while everyone else sparks up fast-thinking fun. But Ishbia’s perhaps alone among billionaires in posing for photographs with the stars on the party boat. Whether or not you believe the allegations about his workplace, there’s no arguing that Ishbia is indulgent. (The Thunder, meanwhile, don’t even know how to open a champagne bottle.)

Present Mat incurs big bills that future Mat must shoulder. Meanwhile, I’d be shocked if Presti’s investors haven’t been taking money out of the Thunder, especially because the Thunder are entitled to a share of the luxury tax Ishbia has paid. The Suns just had the highest payroll in NBA history and missed the playoffs entirely, while the Thunder have the 24th highest payroll and won the whole enchilada. Next year the Thunder will pay Shai’s salary with Ishbia bucks.

That’s how it goes. The NBA always has an Ishbia or two. These deep-pocketed rubes almost always new to the NBA. Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, James Dolan, and Mikhail Prokhorov all arrived in Richie Rich fever dreams, and failed to win titles. After it starts to hurt, the general trend is they hire a real professional to run the team, take a back seat, and improve. The collective bargaining agreement is well designed to bring Ishbia’s spending in line—the punitive measures, like the repeater tax and the second apron, which seemed funny a while back, are more effective when they’re less theoretical. Some people have to feel it.

The Celtics won the 2024 title, then entered a period of spending without care. Just one year later, the team has been sold and the Celtics are shedding crazy valuable parts like Jrue Holiday. Jayson Tatum is somewhere right now wondering when the Celtics will be back in the Finals. What we know is that the Celtics don’t have time to rebuild like the Thunder did.

To win with Shai, the Thunder panned for gold, over a massive chunk of the riverbank. Your team might want to develop a young keeper or two who can help you win a playoff series. Presti knows the way to do that is to devote almost the entire roster, and seasons, and coaching staff, to the effort. That’s just the math. To rebuild with youth you need to put elite player development into the entire system, run dozens of players through it, and then say goodbye to most of those players because you’re looking for players who make playoff teams better.

To end up with a few player development keepers like Lu Dort and Aaron Wiggins, the Thunder brought in and shipped out Darius Bazley, Andre Roberson, Aleksej Pokuševski, Josh Giddey, Lindy Waters III, Mike Muscala, Jaylen Hoard, Tre Mann, and dozens more. For someone who has stayed in one place for six years, Shai has played with a massive collection of teammates.

They didn’t always get it right: two years after the Thunder let him go, Ty Jerome became incredible for the Cavaliers. But if you see more cards, you’re more likely to build a great poker hand.

And importantly, Presti turned down all the offers he must have received for the young players who make the core of his excellent team. Who knows what incredible NBA players he could have received for Chet Holmgren or Jalen Williams. Presti has a hardfought collection of players he likes. I heard from another team that was blown away that Presti wouldn’t even consider offers for tenth-man Kenrich Williams.

The Pacers are similar. Rick Carlisle had a vision for Blur Ball and it dang near won them an NBA title. They spent years seeking out the right players to go around Tyrese Haliburton. The Raptors had a system that used Pascal Siakam one way, and they weren’t sure that made him a max player. The Pacers were like we know what do with that guy who never gets tired. The Knicks saw Obi Toppin’s flaws, the Pacers saw a big man who never stopped bouncing around the floor. They gambled on arguably the best athlete in the draft in Benn Mathurin, and an absolutely brilliant and strong player in Andrew Nembhard. They unearthed a big man from the Heat’s deep bench: Thomas Bryant runs and shoots 3s with a smile on his face.

Over time it became a machine that badly diminishes Jalen Brunsons and Donovan Mitchells in crunch time. The Pacers are changing the league, and giving small-market, low-budget teams a new playbook. The Raptors and Blazers are following in their wake. When the team goal is 48-minutes of hellish intensity, you can’t employ Anfernee Simons–hence the Blazers’ reported trade for Jrue Holiday. We’ll see, though, if other front offices can keep up Presti’s decade of stacking one great decision on top of another. He has hit a lot of singles.

And a massive home run. Presti traded Kawhi Leonard and Joel Embiid’s high-priced injury-prone sidekick Paul George … for:

• one title and counting,

• Shai, the MVP of the season and the Finals,

• Jalen Williams, the team’s second-best player who’s elite at both ends and had a 40-point Finals game,

• major cap flexibility,

• picks that include Wednesday’s 24th overall,

• next year’s unprotected Clippers pick.

The Clippers are old just as the Pacers are teaching the league to play intense and fast. Depending on how much you believe in the durability of Kawhi and James Harden, the 2026 Clippers pick could be fantastic. This would not have surprised 2019 Sam Presti.

As his inner thoughts exist in a lockbox, we don’t know much about how Presti thinks beyond a lot of talk about not taking shortcuts. But we do know Presti is in the Sam Hinkie mold, and the guts of Hinkie’s strategy leaked several years ago. The 2016 resignation letter from Hinkie to Josh Harris and the 12 investors in the 76ers could have been written by Prestii:

There has been much criticism of our approach. There will be more. A competitive league like the NBA necessitates a zig while our competitors comfortably zag. We often chose not to defend ourselves against much of the criticism, largely in an effort to stay true to the ideal of having the longest view in the room.

The longest view in the room.

Hinkie isn’t saying that always works. He’s saying it’s his read of the NBA market that in this marketplace, that’s slow thinking is the way to zig when others zag. Most GMs, most of the time, are worried about losing their amazing jobs. They don’t have six years to be proven smart, so they don’t have six-year plans. They’d prefer to purchase ready-made players who make them look good today. That means, from Hinkie’s point of view, that tomorrow is available at a discount.

Hinkie left the NBA almost a decade ago. But his whole letter functions as a guide to Thunder thinking. He continues:

Here’s Warren Buffett in the late 80s on this topic: “In any sort of a contest—financial, mental, or physical—it’s an enormous advantage to have opponents who have been taught that it's useless to even try.” Ask who wants to trade for an in-his-prime Kevin Garnett and 30 hands will go up. Ask who planned for it three or four years in advance and Danny Ainge is nearly alone. Same for Daryl Morey in Houston trading for James Harden. San Antonio’s Peter Holt said after signing LaMarcus Aldridge this summer, “R.C. [Buford] came to us with this plan three years ago, four years ago—seriously. And we’ve worked at it ever since.”

Your team might get a good player in the draft tomorrow. But most likely what they need to beat Sam Presti is a new ability to spend years essentially like the Little Red Hen. Doing every little step.

There’s another TrueHoop story in the works to follow this one, though: I confess that I’ve long been enamored of long-term thinking, and reasoning, and the prefrontal cortex thinking that undergirds good long-term team planning and my favorite obsession: divining the truth. I’m a fan of thinking slow.

But you need both, and I’m learning now that I’ve long undervalued thinking fast and living in the moment. In the years of research I did for my book on athletic movement, Ballistic, I got a masterclass in the importance of the opposite. That story is coming soon.

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