Fame for OKC, and not just 15 minutes

A day of reflection, pride and purpose for a team that plays its own way.

The celebration was not exactly dry, but it was sober. Jaylen Williams had his first experience with alcohol. Champagne and a Michelob Ultra. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “It was all disgusting.” Understood, but maybe he should have tried real beer.

But then Shai Gilgeous-Alexander ended the festivities by telling the crowd, “If you drink, don’t drive.” This was Oklahoma City on Tuesday. The Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup a week prior to that and some of their hangovers are just setting in. But even though Williams wore a Kobe Bryant T-shirt to the Thunder’s NBA championship celebration, this is a defiantly original group, from their play to their behavior to their composition.

It took Alex Caruso and Isaiah Hartenstein, the old guys on a team that isn’t very old, to teach most of the Thunder kids how to open the champagne bottles, after the Game 7 victory over Indiana. But the franchise doesn’t turn its back on history.

Thirty years ago, Terry McVeigh drove his Ryder rental truck to the Alfred J. Murrah Federal Building, downtown. Inside he had fertilizer and diesel fuel. He set off the fuses, got in another car, and drove away. The explosion burned up cars, damaged 300 buildings in the area, and killed 168 people.

McVeigh was executed six years later. The city built a stark memorial, with 168 chairs in a courtyard. The Thunder’s parade vehicles stopped at the site of the bombing, where some Oklahomans had put Thunder jerseys on the chairs of their loved ones. A basketball championship can’t be compared to a day as ghastly as April 19, 1995. The least you can say is that some of Tuesday’s celebrants had no trouble remembering the last time they were assembled.

There were essays in the papers that expressed how special it was to hear Oklahoma City’s name on the 6 o’clock news, or in website headlines. Too often the city and state have been treated as a spawning ground for vicious tornadoes, or mocked because of an education system that is ranked 49th in the country and recently decreed that history students must learn about the nonexistent “irregularities” in the 2020 Presidential election.

“I can speak for many Thunder fans when I say this isn’t just a championship, it’s a cultural touchstone,” wrote Laura Albritton in the Oklahoman. “It’s a moment in which the country is forced to stop pretending we’re invisible…Oklahoma is full of magic. Teeming with heart. Hospitality. Hustle. And now Oklahoma is full of champions too. We aren’t just flyover country anymore.”

The Thunder doesn’t actually have any Oklahomans on the roster. But it isn’t just a commercial enterprise that plopped down in the flatlands. Its success is tied to a city’s blossoming.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced the Hornets out of New Orleans. It happened just a few weeks before training camp. They weren’t going to hopscotch from town to town. They needed a home, and Oklahoma City was fairly close and, most important, had an arena waiting.

Without a significant marketing program or season ticket drive, Oklahoma City’s latent urge for sports entertainment took off. For two years the Hornets averaged over 18,000 fans per game in a town that knew it couldn’t keep them. Chris Paul worked the community hard, which helped, but the joyful noise and the gate receipts convinced NBA commissioner David Stern that this could be a real market. When Howard Schultz couldn’t get a suitable arena built in Seattle, he sold the Supersonics to Clay Bennett, and an NBA sophomore named Kevin Durant became the state’s first professional star.

What happens if Oklahoma City doesn’t build the arena on spec? Probably nothing, which was the sum total of downtown activities anyway. City fathers cast their nets for corporations to move. They thought they had United Airlines, but Indianapolis beat them out. Curious, mayor Ron Lorick went to Indy. He saw a sports-heavy downtown area with restaurants, bars and shops on top of each other. “We’ve got to get something like that,” he said. Irony lives.

In 1993, OKC voters gave themselves a one-cent sales tax for five years. That money would build an arena, a minor league baseball park (which has housed several Big 12 tournaments) and a canal. It took nine years for the arena to open, but it was there when the Hornets needed it. When they went back home, OKC fans weren’t going back to the dead zone. They approved another sales tax that lasted 15 months, to modernize the building in 2008.

But soon it became the smallest arena in the NBA, and you know there’s never been an owner that didn’t have an Edifice Complex. This time it was mayor David Holt who drove the referendum. Yet another sales tax, this one for six years, would raise $850 million, and the Thunder would kick in $50 million. Such proposals have crash-landed throughout America in recent years. In 2023, seventy-one percent of OKC voters said yes, and the new building should be ready by 2028.

By then the populace will be disappointed if there isn’t at least one more championship banner. Certainly the Thunder has the youth and the structure to be favored for seasons to come.

But the players also saw Tyrese Haliburton crumple near the mid-court line on Sunday. Dreams can land on a gurney at any moment. Besides, the rest of the NBA realizes it has to reach the OKC standard. Some teams are already headed there.

Houston, the No. 2 seed in the West, couldn’t make enough shots. So it traded for Durant and gave up Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks. That still leaves the Rockets with Alpern Sengun underneath, Fred Van Vleet out front and Amen Thompson everywhere.

Dallas, which seemed like a wasteland two months ago, will draft Cooper Flagg No. 1 on Wednesday night. He might be the most anticipated college player since….Anthony Davis, who will be Dallas’ power forward, with Dereck Lively and Daniel Gafford underneath. Kyrie Irving, who signed a 3-year deal with the Mavericks Tuesday, should be back from ACL surgery in January. Flagg is 6-foot-10 and outrageously polished in every area except shooting, which will come. If he’s only 80 percent of what Luka Doncic was, the Mavericks will be a clear and present danger.

San Antonio has the No. 2 pick in the draft, which means they could take guard Dylan Harper (Ron’s son). The Spurs also have No. 14. They already have Victor Wembayama, who appears to have recovered from deep vein thrombosis in his shoulder, plus a full year of De’Aaron Fox, plus a well-established Stephon Castle, the Rookie of the Year. If there are any championship-hungry veterans out there whose last names happen to rhyme with Antetokoumnpo, San Antonio can bring a heavy bid to the auction.

Cleveland had the best team in the East last year and will return that team, with few exceptions, to the wars this year.

Orlando, when healthy, can block out the sun with Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, brother Moritz Wagner and Wendell Carter. The Magic craved more shooting and brought Desmond Bane to provide it.

In fact, there are so many intriguing teams in 2025-26 that I sketched out a five-game Christmas Day schedule, realizing you’ll be glued to the NFL games on Netflix anyway:

New York at Indiana.

LA Lakers at Cleveland.

Houston at Oklahoma City.

San Antonio at Dallas.

Denver at Golden State.

Meanwhile, the Thunder will be reminded that the hard part starts now, that its players will be henceforth judged against the 68 wins of this regular season and the four playoff series they won. There’s nothing like your first love, your first championship, even your first beer. But the Thunder seems to know why it was the last team to park the bus. Something about first instincts.