Earlier this season, I fell into the same trap as many.
The Oklahoma City Thunder was off to a 24-1 start. It looked like, somehow, the 68-win reigning champions had reached a new level of dominance despite missing Jalen Williams, a rising star coming off an NBA Finals in which he silenced any postseason doubters with a 40-point explosion against the Indiana Pacers.
Now, two months after it felt as if OKC going back-to-back was inevitable, OKC is in an extended slump, with the root of its struggles a familiar one.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has remained on his historic pace, appearing likely to win his second consecutive MVP award and putting up averages of 32 points, six rebounds and six assists while shooting 55% from the field and 39% from 3-point range. Chet Holmgren has broken out en route to what should be his first season as an NBA All-Star and he could win Defensive Player of the Year for the first time.
Even with OKC’s stars playing as well as one could expect, the Thunder is slumping toward a worse record than it had last season.
Why? How?
How could a team that appeared to be invincible look like one that may not even feel like the favorite going into a series against the Denver Nuggets? The answer is simple: Shooting.
This iteration of the Thunder has never been a good shooting team. Gilgeous-Alexander, a near-perfect offensive player, has always had to work around his lack of elite 3-point shooting. Holmgren, while a capable outside shooter, has always been unwilling and inconsistent from deep. OKC’s trio of Lu Dort, Cason Wallace and Alex Caruso, the one that defines the identity of the reigning champs, are all inconsistent, and at times flat-out poor, shooters. When healthy, Williams is a solid outside shooter who took nearly 5 3s per game last season, but on the court, his shot looked shaky this season, even when he was willing to shoot it, which felt like never. Ajay Mitchell was a burst of fresh air from deep, shooting 35% on four attempts, but in his first two seasons, he’s suffered injuries that have kept him out of the lineup.
Long story short, OKC’s shooting has been unsustainably bad, 33% from 3-point range in the last 15 games, but there is now legitimacy to the claim that the team can’t shoot compared to its counterparts.
In that same span, Denver has shot 38% from deep, San Antonio and Houston have both shot below 32% and have also been underwhelming, relative to expectations, over that stretch, with San Antonio going 9-6 and Houston going 8-7. Denver has also gone 9-6 over that stretch, overcoming injuries to Nikola Jokic, Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray to stay in the third seed in the loaded Western Conference.
The difference between OKC, San Antonio and Houston is primarily expectations. The Spurs, in a similar spot to OKC from two seasons ago, when the Thunder won 57 games and nearly knocked off the eventual Western Conference Champion Dallas Mavericks, are playing with house money, but they also have better shooters up and down the roster than OKC does already. Harrison Barnes, Devin Vassell, Victor Wembenyama and others are all elite 3-point shooters that shoot with volume, one of the primary issues that OKC faces even when healthy, as Holmgren, Williams and Gilgeous-Alexander all take fewer than five attempts per game. Meanwhile, Wembenyama, Barnes and Vassell are all at 4.9 attempts per game or higher, including seven attempts per game from Vassell.
Houston, like OKC, has a volume problem, but it has players in Kevin Durant, Josh Okogie and Reed Sheppard who are hyper-efficient with their few shots, while OKC suffers from a lack of 3-point volume and doesn’t have players with a track record of accuracy.
Along with fleeting late-game offense, a lack of 3-point volume will likely play a large factor in Houston’s eventual demise, while San Antonio’s shooters shoot with enough volume and efficiency, despite its poor outside shooting as a team over the past 15 games, to open up 3-point variance opportunities come the postseason.
OKC has one shooter on the roster who has proven to be elite over multiple seasons and playoff runs in Isaiah Joe, who has improved his off-the-dribble game along with his mid-range shooting this season, but has been pulled off the floor in the postseason in multiple series over the last two seasons.
The Thunder’s shooting is a problem that impacts everything it does, whether that’s its spacing, rebounding, or its ability to set its vaunted defense. But the person impacted most by the lack of consistency from the outside has been Gilgeous-Alexander
With Williams missing most of the season due to injury and visibly struggling and working through his recovery from his wrist injury when he was healthy and Mitchell constantly coming in-and-out of the lineup, Gilgeous-Alexander has had to do most of the tough shotmaking in all spots for OKC this season. That’s nothing new for the reigning MVP. After all, he’s one of the greatest shotmakers the NBA has ever seen, and he makes the difficult look routine on a game-by-game basis.
But, throughout Gilgeous-Alexander’s time in OKC, he’s been best when paired with elite shooting, something that the Thunder have scarcely provided him with. This season, the OKC two-man lineup with the best offensive rating is Gilgeous-Alexander and Joe, who, when sharing the floor, generate the 37th-best two-man figure in the league at 124.5. Numbers have always favored Gilgeous-Alexander with plus shooting, including last season when the three-man lineup of Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Kenrich Williams had the best offensive rating of any in the NBA with a rating of 138.1, albeit in less than 200 minutes on the court.
Gilgeous-Alexander is the same as many high-volume offensive players in that way. Surround him with shooting and proper spacing and he’ll figure out the rest.
Despite this, OKC has never sought out truly elite shooters other than Joe, even though it has the resources, both tradeable draft picks and medium-sized contracts, to do so. With the two most attractive assets in the league, those contracts and picks aplenty, what is stopping OKC from going out and adding an elite shooter and only giving up one high-level defender to do so?
New Orleans’ Trey Murphy III is the best example of this now that Cam Johnson was traded to the Denver Nuggets over the offseason.
Murphy makes roughly $28 million per season and is in the first year of a four-year, $112 million contract. That number is manageable for OKC, which would likely send out one of Dort or Caruso, along with Jaylin Williams, in a deal, and would actually shed short-term salary in the move. Murphy’s cap hit jumps by roughly $2 million each season and accounts for about 17% of the cap for the next three seasons. Caruso is under contract for the same amount of time as Murphy, so, while invaluable to OKC, it may make more sense to shed the multiyear salaries of Caruso and Jaylin Williams as an easy swap that keeps the Thunder’s cap sheet looking essentially the same, assuming the second roster spot left open in this hypothetical trade is replaced by Branden Carlson getting a full-time deal to replace Williams as OKC’s third center.
Multiple draft picks would have to be sent to New Orleans as well, but with the Thunder having three tradeable first-round picks in the loaded 2026 NBA Draft and the 2027 NBA Draft, it needs to move draft picks, and Murphy is inarguably a better use of those picks than trading them for other future draft assets if OKC’s goal is to win the championship this season.
If Murphy’s price is just too high for the historically cautious Sam Presti, then cheaper, but still capable shooters are ripe for the picking across the league. Simone Fontecchio in Miami, Ty Jerome in Memphis, Corey Kispert in Atlanta and George Niang and Svi Mykhailiuk in Utah are all realistic trade candidates that could be had for a limited price, assuming general sanity from their current teams.
But Murphy makes a ton of basketball sense, and while OKC’s history says it’ll rest on its championship laurels, get healthy and run it back with a reigning championship roster that it brought back 1-15 this summer. That makes all the sense in the world, and OKC is going to be heard from in the postseason and could very well repeat, but its position is rare.
One championship will be a resounding disappointment for this group, and it has the assets to get aggressive whenever it wants for any quality of player. So while Giannis Antetokounmpo may be a pie-in-the-sky dream, adding Murphy is realistic, both from a salary cap perspective and in terms of what he would cost in a trade.
Is it likely that OKC trades for Murphy, or any other high-impact player? No. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t, and if it sticks to its normal formula of patience and reloading through the draft, the Nuggets, Spurs and others will be licking their chops at the opportunity to force anyone other than Gilgeous-Alexander to make a shot in the postseason.
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