Ranking biggest threats to a potential Thunder dynasty: Wemby, new Lakers owner, more could derail OKC

By now you’ve surely heard what we presume is Adam Silver’s favorite statistic: the NBA has had seven different NBA champions in the past seven years. This is the parity era, but we frequently forget that. After all, last season’s champions, the Boston Celtics, entered this season as the betting favorite to repeat. The 2023 champion Denver Nuggets were tied with Boston as favorites going into last season, and the 2020 champion Lakers also opened their title defense season as favorites.

That’s how it usually goes in the NBA. Once a team wins its first championship, we tend to believe that more championships are coming even if league-wide trends suggest that we shouldn’t. A version of that is playing out right now with the Oklahoma City Thunder right now.

Not only are the Thunder the substantial favorites to win it all again in 2026 (+230 on DraftKings), but the wider basketball world believes they’re headed for a dynasty. On paper, they’re built for one. They’re young. They’ve accumulated so many draft picks that they’re insulated against CBA-related roster churn. But most of all, they’re really, really good. They are one of only four post-merger NBA teams to win at least 68 games. They had the greatest point-differential in league history. This isn’t just a champion. This is a juggernaut even if Tyrese Haliburton’s injury robbed them of their crowning moment.

All of the indicators for a dynasty are here. But, at least recently, dynasties haven’t existed. We don’t know who or what it will be yet, but something is going to create meaningful obstacles between the Thunder and the dynasty they crave. Kevin Durant moving to the Houston Rockets on Sunday became the first. Others will emerge as well. So let’s try to figure out who or what those obstacles will be by ranking the five biggest threats to a potential OKC dynasty.

5. Mark Walter

For those of you who don’t know who Mark Walter is, until Wednesday, he was best known as the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. But now, he’s added the Lakers to his portfolio.

Institutionally, the Lakers have every advantage an organization could ask for. They play in Los Angeles, which makes them a recruiting powerhouse, and their history of winning gives them an edge on that front over the Clippers. They make money hand over fist. Their local television deal alone will pay them roughly $3 billion over 20 years. The playing field should not be level for them.

But for the past decade or so at least, it has been. The Lakers haven’t exactly been cheap overall, but they certainly haven’t spent to the degree that they should have. The whole reason the Thunder have Alex Caruso right now is that the Lakers cheaped out when he became a free agent in 2021. They are known for being thrifty when it comes to off-court spending. They don’t have a well-respected front office or support staff. In other words, they don’t flex their financial and institutional muscles in the ways that they should.

But the Dodgers do. That’s part of how they’ve made four World Series and won two under Walter. And now, the Lakers presumably will as well, right as Luka Dončić enters his prime. Dončić is one of the few players in the NBA that can credibly claim he’s every bit as good as MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He did just beat him in a playoff series last year, after all. Gilgeous-Alexnader has been supported by Sam Presti in his rise. Now, Dončić will hopefully be able to claim similar support from what is potentially about to become the most dangerous organization in basketball.

4. Nikola Jokić

Dončić can claim that he’s as good as Gilgeous-Alexander. There’s no claiming where Jokić is concerned. He’s just better. He’s the best player in the world and has been for some time. There is no telling how much longer that will remain the case, but it’s worth noting that when Jokić faced the Thunder a month ago, he very nearly delayed the start of this possible dynasty by at least a year, and he essentially did so by himself. He averaged roughly 28 points, 14 rebounds and six assists in their second-round duel, but nobody on his team could make a shot except for Aaron Gordon, who got hurt at the end of Game 6. A healthy Gordon or some better shooting luck in the fourth quarters of Game 4 or 5 and we might be talking about a mini Nuggets dynasty right now.

Of course, all of that is a good reason why Jokić might not necessarily be such a significant threat to the Thunder. He’s stuck on a Nuggets team with very limited maneuverability. They can’t trade a first-round pick until 2031 at the earlier. They’re stuck with an undesirable Michael Porter Jr. contract on their books, but even when it expires in two years, they’re going to be deep into the luxury tax. Right now, they don’t even have a GM.

Jokić is therefore only an outside threat to the Thunder at the moment. But if the Nuggets can get their act together, or perhaps more distressingly, if Jokić ever finds himself playing for an organization better equipped to maximize his talents, then Oklahoma City will find itself in meaningful danger.

3. The disease of more

Decades ago, when Pat Riley was leading the Showtime dynasty in Los Angeles, he coined the phrase “the disease of more.” Essentially, he’s argued, once a team wins a championship, everyone starts wanting “more.” More money. More shots. More fame. More everything. There is only so much of all of that to go around. Age is probably the single greatest dynasty slayer. The disease of more probably comes in second.

It killed the Michael Jordan-era Bulls prematurely. Jerry Krause wanted to build his own, non-Jordan-based roster. Scottie Pippen wanted to get paid. It killed Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s Lakers as well. Bryant wanted to be the centerpiece. It wouldn’t be fair to say that it ended Golden State’s dynasty. The Warriors won in 2022, after all. But Kevin Durant’s frustrations with his place in Golden State surely contributed to their post-2019 dip, and elements of this pushed Klay Thompson out the door last summer. Pretty much every champion experiences some of this to an extent. At the very least, it’s really hard to want it as badly the second time as you did the first.

The Thunder look as immune to this as any young champion ever has. They still do post-game interviews as a group. There doesn’t appear to be much ego here. But they also hadn’t won anything yet. Ego often develops out of winning. We’re going to see this play out overtime. I’m not saying it’s impossible for the Thunder to avoid. I’m saying avoiding it very rarely actually happens. The San Antonio Spurs mostly did, at least until after Tim Duncan retired, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Sacrifice is going to be one of the most important factors in whatever comes next for the Thunder. The CBA almost got an entire slot on this list, but I ultimately lumped it into this one. The Thunder are probably going to be paying three max contracts to three superstars. Any one of them would probably be capable of being the best player on a great team if they decided they wanted that. Their role players could almost certainly get paid more playing elsewhere, and probably get more minutes and shots as well. Sure, there are draft picks here to cycle in replacements as needed, but it’s no guarantee that they hit. The easiest way to win a championship is to keep the team that won the first together.

That’s going to be almost impossible in this cap environment. The Thunder are inevitably going to lose players. What they can hopefully control and avoid is losing their identity along the way. Right now, this certainly doesn’t look like a team destined to be torn apart by ego. Most champions feel that way at first. They are all tested. The Thunder will be as well. 

Jokić is the NBA’s best player today. Wembanyama may be the NBA’s best player tomorrow. Literally. Reports before he was drafted stated that there were people around the league that thought he could be the NBA’s best player by his third season, and little that happened in his first two should have dissuaded them aside from the scary blood clot he dealt with at the end of this season. His health is the biggest question mark here.

If he’s back at full strength this season, he’ll likely compete with Gilgeous-Alexander for MVP. The only question is whether or not his team will be ready to match up with Oklahoma City’s. They took a step in that direction with the De’Aaron Fox trade at the deadline, but that was only a start. The Spurs have more roster-building to do. This offseason will be critical, but the game-changer is probably at least a ways away. There have been hints during the Kevin Durant sweepstakes that the Spurs are operating cautiously because they have their eye on another star, one that comes closer to operating on Wembanyama’s timeline.

If Giannis Antetokounmpo becomes available in the near future, for instance, that poses major problems for the Thunder. The same goes for almost any All-NBA-caliber player younger than, say, his mid-30s. The Spurs have the assets to get just about anyone. They have a ton of young talent in the building already. And, more than anything, dynasties are almost always led by the best player in the NBA. Maybe that will be Gilgeous-Alexander over the next few years, but as dominant as he was this season, the widespread expectation is that this is going to Wembanyama’s league soon enough. If he’s as good as we think he is, he might just claim Oklahoma City’s dynasty for himself. No single human being is a greater threat to the Thunder. But there is one abstract concept that stands above him.

1. Chaos

The world is a random and chaotic place. Basketball exemplifies that more than any other sport. Someone on the other side gets hot, makes a few 3s and swings a game. That game swings a series. That series swings a championship. The Thunder know this. They may have won the 2024 championship if P.J. Washington hadn’t made a million corner 3s he didn’t usually make. It doesn’t take much to derail a season, and it therefore takes even less to derail a dynasty.

Holmgren is an obvious long-term injury risk, and Haliburton is a stark reminder of how quickly and devastatingly a single injury can alter a team’s trajectory. Williams and Gilgeous-Alexander don’t seem like they are, but neither was Jayson Tatum before he went down. We can’t assume perfect health indefinitely. We can’t assume that their landscape of opponents remains idle either. If the wrong player demands a trade, or, as Dončić’s move portends, if the wrong general manager gets the wrong idea, someone could plausibly stumble into a team that poses a problem to Oklahoma City. Or maybe the rules change, and Oklahoma City’s ultra-physical defense starts getting whistled for more fouls than it can sustain.

I don’t know what it is that will ultimately threaten the Thunder. Nobody does. Just that history says it will be something. If the NBA were predictable we probably wouldn’t have just had seven different champions in seven years. Weird stuff happens. It’s going to keep happening. And how it will affect the Thunder, we can’t possibly know.