The Oklahoma City Thunder have the NBA's third best net rating and fourth best record in the league. They appear ahead of schedule, but are not interested in discussing whether they are already championship contenders.

"It says that we're really playing together and we're prioritizing winning over anything else," Chet Holmgren said following Oklahoma City's win over the Boston Celtics. "But as far as long term, it doesn't really prove anything, I guess you could say, or it doesn't kind of satisfy anybody.

"We know we have a long ways to go. We're at 32 games into the season, so we still have 50 games left. We got a lot of lessons to learn, a lot of lessons we've already learned from that we've got to kind of keep in the back of our mind."

"I think we all stay in the moment and I think that's why we've been able to get better," Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. "We just stay in the moment, attack the day, attack the program in front of us. Then we all have the right intentions and want to win at the end of the day."