13 Reasons Why The Oklahoma City Thunder Are This Year’s Suicide Squad
This is gonna be such a tight team
[1]
“History, which is a simple whore,” wrote Roberto Bolaño, “has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”
[2]
The 2012–13 Denver Nuggets, an accidental masterpiece, were the ultimate proof of the George Karl Theorem, which contends that random talent and resentment thrown maximally into an uptempo crock pot will result in the tastiest fucking shit that there is. Danilo Gallinari, that team’s second-leading scorer, has drifted through the past six seasons waiting for history to return to his bones, trembling woefully until the current moment, in which he has landed upon this, C[aptain Ahab]P3’s ultimate kamikaze ship.
[3]
After 12 years away from Oklahoma City, Chris Paul is back. “My rookie year there was a McDonald’s right by where we practiced, and I’d stop and get a McGriddle combo every day,” Paul now tells ESPN, fully nude upon return; completely naked, and in a glorious Proustian reverie as he does a fast food inventory of the past. “Every day. And I’d usually get an extra hash brown and try to get a bigger orange juice. And I would get home, and my brother and I would get Chick-fil-A. As long as it wasn’t Sunday, we would get Chick-fil-A on the way home. And then we would usually order pizza at night. We didn’t know any different. We were young, first time living away from home. But everything’s a lot different now. Some of the biggest choices I make daily are what I put into my body.”
[4]
Chris Paul in his brother’s arms in Houston, May 2018, limping from the stadium to his limousine, minutes after turning in the most beautifully hubristic, nearly dynasty-snapping performance of the decade. He dared to shimmy in Steph Curry’s face and then his body, which he has always pushed much too far beyond its possibilities, broke on him.
[5]
Sam Anderson of New York Times Magazine wrote a book about the Thunder’s jarring, rapid establishment as both a franchise and a competitive NBA force, in the context of the whole of local Oklahoma history. “Boom Town” has a lot of neat stories in it but is rich with noxious fake-literary magazine writing curlicues, so I would not recommend reading it without a vomit bag.
[6]
I look at this roster and feel the sweet reckless runaway energy portrayed in the elegiac Roches’ banger “Hammond Song”:
This team will throw itself away and take you with it. They will be the last statement of basketball’s humanity before General Manager Sam Presti strikes a permanent note of austerity upon the league with his “war chest” of “assets.”
[7]
Andre Roberson, the Queequeg to Steven Adams’ Ishmael, will co-write a book with Adams about this season. In it, they will tell of how future perennial All-Star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was forged in this team’s fire, taught to hate and obliterate like only a small man in an ocean of giants can. Adams and Roberson will share a hotel room for every road game, sleep-deprived as they toil away on their manuscript.
[8]
Victory is for fucking losers. This team is for the culture. Their specific simmer of pathos and pride will inspire the greatest howlers of basketball, a later generation to be made in ways that will disrupt the quantitatively obsessed mush that the sport’s rhetoric has become. The Shocker is lost within this wave but it holds the flicker of life close enough to its beer belly to shelter its flame, a barely persisting fire for you little bitches of tomorrow to make into an inferno. The 2019–20 Thunder will be your kindling.
[9]
The entire Thunder roster is soaked in gasoline (except for Roberson) and Dennis Schroeder is The Matchstick Kid, skateboarding into the locker room with the constant threat of apocalypse. Ill-advised but nonetheless well-salaried podcasters will call him “The Oklahoma City Bomber” for how he unnerves the team’s culture. But by season’s end Schroeder will have an unbreakable bond with disgraced head coach Billy Donovan, who will wield the pariah point guard’s danger as his only form of power against these men.
[10]
Nerlens Noel will murder Mike Muscala. Kyle Singler will also die, but no one will report it for weeks.
[11]
Aubrey McClendon isn’t dead. He has been on Epstein’s Island since he “crashed his car” in 2016 and he still owns the Thunder, but during this season he will be sussed out by the FBI, a sacrificial and largely metaphorical lamb. He will sell the Thunder, his last piece of capital, off to Howard Schultz, the purchase price driven way down by both shame and the huge financial hit the league has taken from rampant Chinese censorship.
Schultz will not move the team back to Seattle as expected, even after every player wears Sonic paraphernalia to the stadium after the sale, but instead he will suggest the move back home is possible only in the event that Joe Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee. When this doesn’t work, Schultz will flip team ownership to the Chinese government. McClendon will use much of his windfall from the sale to start a racist, Republican-bait NBA media empire that is spectacular in its ambition and utterly fails. Billy McFarland will take the rest of the money.
[12]
The Thunder and the Memphis Grizzlies will be mortal enemies; enraged by the youth and optimism of Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr., Chris Paul will seek to snuff out their exuberance with more passion and precision than he can find against any other opponent. Jackson and Morant will not buckle but instead push back with a fury that creates, between the two teams, a gorgeous competitive wormhole that only the most hoopophilic of fools will be myopic and fortunate enough to consistently witness.
[13]
I will cherish this team, I will make love to it in a way that you could not fathom and wouldn’t want to. I will weep for them and scream for them, I will cheer their pursuit of a singular lifeform, the construction of a basketball biodome more gnarly than any yet seen, more indignant in the face of time and possibility’s grim realities than anyone should be. This team is an idiot writing a 1,000-page novel, too delusional for most to think about but psychedelic in its catastrophes, fearsome in its hot persistence that it exists.
