This season, the Oklahoma City Thunder have had a lot of injuries. Well, maybe not—it’s hard to say what counts as an injury for any team looking to repeat as champions. The long run to the last title creates pains that stretch into the next season, and the hardened understanding of How To Win Games usually means that you’ve got the luxury of resting guys who might technically be able to play. For OKC, that’s resulted in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander recently sitting out for nearly a month; Jalen Williams missing more than half of the season; Isaiah Hartenstein sitting 29 times; Alex Caruso, 22.

Their record doesn’t show it. The Thunder have a 51-15 record, running past opponents with only partial versions of their roster all season long. There was a bit of a dip in competitive force, for a second there, with the Thunder’s historic 24-1 start turning into a 21-15 midsection, but in recent days they’re sharpening back into their playoff selves with nine wins in their past 10 games. The most recent victory was an exclamation-point against the Denver Nuggets, one of their more potent Western Conference rivals—Denver pushed the Thunder to seven games in last year’s conference semifinals, and this week’s contest was the second barn-burner between the two teams in as many weeks.

While both games were close, OKC also won both. And, characteristic of their season, both wins looked very different, with the more recent victory displaying a particularly unique version—a wholly unseen form, perhaps—of the team. Gilgeous-Alexander’s dominance was the familiar part of it: he accumulated 35 points with only four free throws, to go with 15 assists, 9 rebounds, and zero turnovers. He also hit the game-winning shot from deep. But who most helped him out was unusual, with big man Jaylin Williams scoring 29 in Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren’s stead, while the hot-gunning guard duo of Ajay Mitchell and McCain combined for 37 off the bench.

Those are three players who made close to no contribution to the Thunder’s 2025 playoff run. McCain wasn’t on the team, Mitchell only saw real minutes during blowouts, and Williams had the slightly larger role of occasionally being asked to throw his large body around, using his fouls liberally. It's safe to say that they weren't needed last year. But this Monday, the trio was the reason that OKC had one of its best offensive outputs of the season, spreading the floor for an unstoppable SGA and draining their own shots, too. The number 129, and the way they got to it, was a very weird thing to see from a blue-and-orange jerseyed team that usually needs consistent turnover creation and the ensuing fast breaks to crack 110 points (they turned the Nuggets over just seven times in this one).

This is not a formula that will necessarily work for the Thunder consistently. Williams has been taking a big step forward this season, with the past six weeks being the most offensively productive span of his four pro seasons, but it was a career night that’s unlikely to repeat a lot; McCain is small and untested, and will be targeted in the playoffs. The other Williams, Jalen, will need to return to health and top-level productivity for the Thunder to be big enough on the wings this postseason, and of course OKC will need its full front-court bevy to rebound and rim-protect well enough to win. But it’s still frightening for the rest of the league, regardless, to see one of the best ever sludgeball teams morph into a high-volume, deep-shooting squad when they need to; to see the Thunder turn to lightning.

At times, developments like these make another OKC title feel so fated that it makes sense to already look toward their summer, when they will keep re-engineering themselves for the next one. That’s when they’ll move closer to tough decisions about how much of their veteran core to retain as nearly all of their youth projects bloom—not quite all of them, though. Nikola Topic, the Serbian point guard drafted 12th overall in 2024, has had abundant health concerns and only recently made his first ever appearance on the floor. Thomas Sorber, drafted 15th overall last summer, tore his ACL before the season began, and has yet to make his. Given OKC’s otherwise dazzling draft-and-development program, one has to wonder if Topic and Sorber, were they playing right now, would already be giving the team more reasons to soon avoid bloated salaries for older players. 

There’s still a lot of obstacles in the near term, though. What has worked for the Thunder in 2025-26 may not continue to work—it’s possible that their newly unpredictable lineups have created a series of unrepresentative “trap” games, in which confused opponents without deep scouting figure out what’s happening to them just a bit more slowly than it happens. That’s not a recipe for success in a seven-game series. And for all their excellence, the Thunder still deal with the same classic problems as every other team: injuries, the push and pull between one-way players on both sides of the floor, and otherworldly forces like Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama. But what they’ve built—a team both extremely talented, and extremely connected by their hard-driving ethic—continues to look better than anything else in basketball.