2012 Oklahoma City Thunder

Jinal Tailor
Jul 25, 2017 · 7 min read

The team that had been forged in legal battles and Seattle and OKC had reached the zenith of professional basketball, the NBA finals. This young squad lost in five against the more-experienced Miami Heat who were led by a LeBron James who was looking to vindicate his decision to leave Cleveland and form a Big Three in Miami with close friends Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. James needed the victory to prove that he could win the big one, that he would not go down in history as a bust. The victory of LeBron James proved decisive for the Thunder, the team never reached the mountain-top again and disintegrated, this is a story of the Oklahoma City Thunder from their inception to July 4th 2016, the end of an era.

In the 2000s, Seattle was a prominent NBA team who struggled off the court with financial difficulty, the owner of the franchise Howard Schultz continued to make heavy financial losses on both the Supersonics and the Seattle Storm. The KeyArena in Seattle was a good arena but by the early 2000s the arena needed to be expanded in order for the Supersonics’ ownership to turn a profit. Schultz needed $220 million from the local government in order to fund an expansion of the arena which would have likely meant that Schultz would have kept ownership of the team. Instead the city of Seattle refused the money and Schultz was forced to sell the team as he could not continue to run his businesses at a loss.

The Starbucks Chief fielded offers for his franchise and an Oklahoma consortium of investors led by Clay Bennett bought the franchise with plans to build a new arena in which they could produce profit and the franchise would not have to be moved. Bennett proposed a new $500 million arena in a Seattle suburb in order to get greater seat revenue for the Supersonics franchise but he needed public money in order to have enough capital to build the arena. However there were a few wrinkles in this plan. The city of Seattle had previously passed legislation called Initiative 91 that restricted the use of public money on sporting arenas. Furthermore the poor financial history of the franchise meant that the Seattle local government refused to bring this legislation out of settlement.

From this point on, there are two distinct strands of historiography. The Seattle strand indicates that Bennett had always wanted to relocate the franchise to OKC with this theory being supported by emails sent by Aubrey McClendon, a minority investor expressing an interest in moving the franchise. Many Seattle fans believed that Bennett’s desire to relocate to OKC could also be supported by the fact he made an outlandish demand of the local government. The ask of $500 Million in public money could be seen as a ridiculous demand due to the fact the government had previously rejected $220 million to refurbish the KeyArena.

However, the ownership point of view was that Seattle was financially unprofitable and they could not in good faith run a basketball team at a loss due to the fact it was a business at the end of the day. Furthermore the ownership group knew that the Chesapeake Arena and Oklahoma as a state could support an NBA team due to the fact it had when the Hornets were relocated during Hurricane Katrina. Katrina meant that the Hornets moved northwards and was a litmus test for the success of the franchise in both popularity and favour among the NBA management. Therefore it could be said that Bennett and the consortium he led knew that Oklahoma was a good market for relocation as it previously supported an NBA franchise.

The ensuing legal battle dwarfed the rookie season of a Small Forward who would become elite in only a matter of years. Kevin Durant was immense during his rookie season but the legal issues hung over the KeyArena like a foul mist that preyed upon Seattle basketball. At the end of the season, the league voted to support the relocation of Seattle to OKC. Over the next four seasons, OKC built and developed a Big Three in the form of Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Kevin Durant. This organic super-team was not unusual, the Trailblazers had drafted a nucleus of high potential athletes. But this team unlike the Trailblazers managed to stay healthy and grow into serious contender in the West. Slowly but surely this group of players reached the zenith of basketball, the NBA Finals in 2012.

This team was hungry but young and inexperienced in the high-pressure stakes of the Finals. This was their first deep run into the playoffs and they faced an incredible opponent. The Miami Big Three is one of the most storied collectives in modern basketball but they needed a championship to validate their decision to form a super-team. In the previous Finals, Miami had lost to the Dallas Mavericks and their frontman LeBron James had seemed to be oddly passive. This team needed to win a championship to validate themselves.

In Game 1, OKC took a huge upset victory at home winning 105–94. Kevin Durant led the way with 36 points while Westbrook chipped in 27/11/8. This young core supplemented by experienced veterans such as Thabo Sefolosha and Nick Collison managed to stem the flow of buckets from LeBron James in the fourth while Dwyane Wade had an off night with him making seven shots off nineteen attempts. OKC looked stronger but this defeat energised a Miami team that had already overcome the tough Boston Celtics in a seven game thriller.

In Game 2, Miami took the lead and never looked back. LeBron put up 32 points and they dominated the game from the opening tip. OKC had made a valiant comeback in the fourth quarter and it looked as if they were going to steal the game from under Miami but unfortunately KD missed a crucial tie-game basket. His heroics which included a clutch three could not stretch to forcing a tie with 34 seconds on the clock which allowed Miami to take Game 2 on the road. OKC had played great but they could not quite finish the job against Miami. If the series went to 2–0 it would have been a different story but taking a game on the road gave Miami a renewed sense of confidence in its team.

The story became startlingly simple for the rest of the series. OKC were a championship-calibre side who was impinged by their youth and naivety in high-stakes situations. Miami were the wily veterans who continued to knock down obstacles that were put in their way and their refusal to make mistakes led to them taking the series and the second NBA championship for the Miami Heat. Oklahoma had been downed by older and more experienced opposition but many basketball analysts believed that OKC were destined for multiple NBA Finals trips in the near future. It does not seem too far a stretch to say that many believed that the Thunder were only a few years away from an NBA championship. Instead this never happened, the following events of this zenith for a fairly young franchise meant that they never reached the mountain-top again.

In October 2012, barley removed from the anguish of falling at the last hurdle, the Oklahoma City Thunder made a seismic move that would come to be a defining moment for the franchise in the future. Oklahoma had signed most of its young talent to contract extensions during the summer period. Westbrook, Durant and Ibaka all got hefty deals that would mean that their services had been renewed for the next few years. However Harden’s deal was a little bit more difficult. Oklahoma due to cap constrictions and fear of the luxury tax, a provision in the 2011 CBA that attempted to restrict the dominance of Miami and LA, only offered Harden $54 million. This was $4.5 million short of the max deal that Harden thought his play deserved. Knowing what happened after the deal it seems ludicrous that a potential MVP was traded because the finances could not work. Oklahoma at this point prioritised financial frugality as they did not have a billionaire owner like other team owners such as Mark Cuban. The consortium who owned OKC did not have an endless supply of money and breaking into the luxury tax threatened the financial future of the franchise due to the fact it was a small market team and less likely to receive the same amount of TV revenue that big markets such as New York receive.

Therefore James Harden was traded for Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb and a first round pick from Houston. Harden as we know went on to be a superstar player who became the face of a franchise after his troubles with Dwight Howard. Kevin Martin was on the downward slope of his career and never really filled the Harden-sized void while Jeremy Lamb struggled in a guard heavy rotation. The first round pick became Steven Adams who is very good in his role as a centre but could be seen as poor compensation for Harden. It was a bad trade but a necessary one so that the franchise could move forward and receive assets for their player instead of just letting Harden walk in the off-season.

The trade had other spillover effects apart from a key piece leaving the Thunder. The public view of the Thunder changed overnight from a franchise that valued success over money to a franchise that was slapped with the tag of being cheap and caring about the bottom-line more than on-court success. This damning assessment of the front-office could be seen to haunt the Thunder throughout this period, pickups such as Josh Huestis were seen as salary cap fillers rather players who could be nurtured into rotational pieces.

Furthermore the trade also may have influenced the mind-set of OKC’s franchise player, Kevin Durant. Durant seemingly left the Thunder due to the fact he was unhappy with the front-office being unwilling to spend money and to continue ‘getting younger’ as he said in his Rolling Stone interview. In one stroke, the franchise’s fate as prospective champions was gone. The James Harden trade signalled the downfall of OKC’s young core, Westbrook and Durant both suffered major injuries and long rehabilitation processes. The three pillars that Sam Presti put his faith in fell one by one until the franchise had slipped out of contention for an NBA championship. Oklahoma’s organic super-team had fallen apart but now there is a new era for Oklahoma City Thunder with the acquisition of Paul George but the scars and the memories from the Big Three era still remains.

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