Say this much for the Oklahoma City Thunder: they keep finding new ways to make the rest of the league look ordinary. On Sunday, they beat the Los Angeles Lakers, then followed that by edging the Detroit Pistons on zero days' rest, and they finished another week without a loss.
Through Sunday’s action, Oklahoma City became the first team to 60 wins, a mark that underlines just how far ahead it is of the field. The Thunder can lock up home-court advantage throughout the playoffs with two more wins, even if the San Antonio Spurs sweep their final week.
The broader point is the one the Thunder have been making all season: there are levels to this. Nikola Jokić’s Nuggets have been on a roll of their own, but Oklahoma City’s pace and consistency have pushed it into a class by itself. The Thunder already beat the Lakers and showed the gap, and they are now likely to fall short of last year’s win total and probably will not outscore opponents by more than 1,000 points the way they did a year ago. Even so, 60 wins in early April is the kind of number that changes the tone of a race.
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That matters now because this is Week 25 of The Athletic NBA Power Rankings, and the exercise is circling back to the preseason predictions from Week 1. Back then, the preview had Oklahoma City finishing first in the West and winning the NBA Finals in six. The Thunder have made that look less like a bold call and more like the most obvious read in the room.
The same review is also measuring San Antonio against a preseason expectation that it would sneak into the playoffs, and that story has turned into one of the season’s sharper surprises. The Spurs are close to being the top seed in the entire conference, even though Victor Wembanyama has missed time. San Antonio went 11-5 with Wembanyama out of the lineup this season, and the Spurs have lost those lineups by only 17 points all year. Last season, they were 13-23 without him and were outscored by 328 points with Wembanyama off the floor.
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That swing tells you as much about the Spurs as the Thunder’s record tells you about the West. The Pistons, meanwhile, were traded midseason and became the latest team to appear in the recap of preseason expectations, another reminder that this league keeps rewriting its own script. The Thunder have the best regular-season answer so far, and the chase behind them now looks less like a competition than a correction.
