Hey there, Last Night In Basketballers — I am, as I do every year, re-appropriating the Three Things I Noticed on League Pass format to preview the upcoming season. Instead of three things I noticed, it’ll be something more along the lines of three things I’m looking forward to, interested in, or want to see. Some of them might be narrative-based, some might be stats, and some might include video. But they'll all be focused on the 2026-27 campaign.
The schedule for those posts will be as follows (podcasts previewing each division with Mo Dakhil are in parentheses):
- Atlantic Division (BOS, BKN, NYK, PHI, TOR) (Podcast)
- Central Division (CHI, CLE, DET, IND, MIL) (Podcast)
- Southeast Division (ATL, CHA, MIA, ORL, WAS) (Podcast)
- Pacific Division (GSW, LAC, LAL, PHX, SAC) (Podcast)
- Northwest Division (DEN, MIN, OKC, POR, UTA) (Podcast)
- Southwest Division (DAL, HOU, MEM, NOP, SAS) (Podcast)
So without further ado, let's get to the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are trying to get back to the mountaintop after losing in the Western Conference Finals last year.
Chet Holmgren, bounceback?
It's easy to forget that Holmgren was really, really good through the first two rounds of last year's playoffs. He put up 18.6 points, 9.1 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.4 steals, and 1.8 blocks in just 31.3 minutes per game. He shot 60% from the field and 38.7% from three on 3.9 attempts per night. He was awesome on defense in sweeps of both the Suns and Lakers. Things were looking up.
The reason it's easy to forget, of course, is because things got so bad in the Western Conference Finals against the Spurs that I ended up writing this in the OKC edition of Have A Good Summer:
Chet Holmgren capped a disaster series with an even further disaster Game 7. There's no way around it: he sucked against the Spurs. On both ends of the floor. He was shook, scared, whatever you want to call it on offense, and the Spurs just had no fear at all of attacking him at the rim on the other side of the floor to the point that he became a non-factor entirely by the end of the series. It was brutal, and his flaws were laid bare for everyone to see. (He hasn't yet developed an off-the-dribble attack from the perimeter or a real post game beyond ducking in against the occasional cross-match, his shot release is still way too slow, he's still not physical enough on the inside, etc.) He is rightfully getting pilloried.
Chet averaged just 10.7 points, 7.1 rebounds, 1.0 assists, 0.7 steals, and 1.1 blocks in the series against the Spurs. He shot only 51% from the field and only took 7.3 shots per game. He shot 27.3% from three, and only even attempted 11 treys in seven games. Worse, as mentioned, the Spurs were totally unafraid of him and took a greater share of their shots in the restricted area with Holmgren on the floor (26.7%) than when he was off it (22.1%).
He also looked mentally broken by Victor Wembanyama, and that's obviously a significant problem given that the Spurs are the Thunder's primary competition for Western Conference supremacy and that Wembanyama isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future and that he is probably only going to get better and better.
So, can Holmgren bounce back from whatever the hell happened to him in that series, or is this going to be a "Ben Simmons after he turned down that layup against the Hawks" situation? I'm choosing to be optimistic. In that Have A Good Summer post, I wrote this immediately after the section quoted above:
The good news is he's a 24-year-old All-NBA player who is allowed to get better from this. I think he will. The idea that he's just cooked because he had the worst series of his life against the best player in the world is pretty silly to me. Obviously, he will have to get over whatever mental blockage he seems to have against Wemby, but I wouldn't bail at the first opportunity to do so. This is still a foundational defensive player with a real offensive skill set, even if it's a complementary one. That's not the kind of thing you just abandon because of one high-profile failure.
Players improve all the time. They bounce back from failures all the time. Especially the best players. And despite what happened in the conference finals, Holmgren is still one of the best players.
Here's hoping that he takes what happened to him against the Spurs personally, and that he comes back this season having shored up what he needs to shore up and with the kind of confidence necessary to stand up to the reigning Western Conference champs whenever those two teams square off.
Cason Wallace, next man up
Wallace is almost surely going to slide into the starting lineup in place of the departed Lu Dort. He's been the fill-in starter whenever somebody has missed time over the last couple of years (he's actually started 101 of his 145 games due to all the absences the Thunder have faced), so it makes logical sense that he'd be the one tapped for the job. It also obviously makes sense because he's the guy on the team who most replicates Dort's skill set given his incredible on-ball defense and his relatively low-usage on offense.
I have absolute confidence that he'll be just fine as the full-time starter. The defense is truly amazing, especially but not exclusively against lead ball-handlers. I had him on Second Team All-Defense in my officially unofficial awards picks last year:
If the Thompsons aren't the best on-the-ball defenders in the league at the moment, it might be because Wallace is. He will strip you of the rock, no problem, anywhere on the floor. (My friend Fred Katz noted on his podcast that Wallace has eight backcourt strips since the All-Star break alone, which is basically one a week, and that totally tracks.) But he's also not just an on-ball menace. He's excellent in passing lanes and, like everyone on the Thunder, elite at rotating on the perimeter to challenge or otherwise deter jumpers.
He's also been a good three-point shooter throughout his career: 37.4% from deep on 4.7 attempts per 36 minutes. The last two seasons have been a bit worse than that (35.6% and 35.1% after he shot 41.9% as a rookie), but the full sample looks strong.
He's not a volume shooter (see those 4.7 attempts per 36) and probably never will be because of the sheer volume of talent the Thunder have elsewhere on offense, and teams will also probably be content to let him fire away from deep because that's preferable to allowing Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to get to the elbows or Jalen Williams to get to the rim or Chet to cut from the dunker spot or Isaiah Hartenstein to take his automatic floater. But if he knocks them down consistently enough, the Thunder will be just fine with that, too.
He made some noise in his season-ending press conference about how much he enjoyed getting to work as more of a lead ball-handler and creator during the stretch of games that SGA missed (he averaged 14.8 points, 3.9 rebounds, 5.4 assists, and 2.0 steals in 31.3 minutes per game during SGA's absence; his usage rate was also 20.3% compared with a career average of just 13.4%), but a regular starting role and a potential contract extension (the Thunder should be doing everything they can to lock him up now and not let him get to restricted free agency in a summer where it looks like a whole bunch of teams will have cap space) should paper over any issues that might be caused by his frustrations at having relatively lower usage.
The wing, shorthanded
The Thunder didn't just trade Dort. They also sent Isaiah Joe and Aaron Wiggins packing, and they received only second-round picks in exchange for each of them. That's three rotation players out the door without anything coming back that the Thunder can use on the court this season, and all three players essentially play the same position.
OKC could play basically any combination of players and go big or small at any time over the last several years, in large part because Mark Daigneault had so much depth on the wings to work with. That depth is now much thinner, obviously. Are there any true wings on this team other than J-Dub?
Wallace and Caruso can play there because they're capable of defending up the positional spectrum, but Wallace was a point guard by trade coming into the NBA and Caruso is a part-time player during the regular season. He's probably going to play 50-55 games and south of 20 minutes a night so that the Thunder can manage him and keep him healthy for the playoffs. The playoffs are what matter more, obviously, but you also have to get through the regular season in order to get there and the lack of wing depth relative to what they've had over the last couple years.
Maybe they play Kenrich Williams as a wing more often or maybe Nikola Topic steps forward or maybe Bennett Stirtz is a factor right away and he's more of an off-guard than he was in college or maybe Jared McCain is just the answer despite the fact that he's tiny and can't really defend. (McCain will be valuable either way because of his shooting and off-the-dribble creation, which OKC definitely needs when SGA is off the court. I still can't believe Sam Presti got him.)
As I write this, I actually don't really know why I'm worrying about this issue at all. They still have so much depth in so many places. They have plenty of bigs and they can all play in pairs or solo. They have so many guards. Just because the guards are all small doesn't mean they can't get away with playing multiple of them at once — especially with some combination of Chet and Hartenstein and Aday Mara (who looks incredible in preseason) behind them. I'm gonna go back and change the font in this section's headline to strikethrough because that's how unworried I now am about the "lack of depth" on the wing. These dudes are gonna whip ass. Carry on.
