With all the components in place, Oklahoma City’s offense appears to be peaking, despite the rebuild requiring patience.

The Thunder have spent years developing an identity with each player on the court, and this is something they have focused on. Oklahoma City used a five-out dribble drive style and had undersized shooting centers even before Chet Holmgren took the court.

Early on, the identity was established, and it was simple to modify for each additional player the Thunder recruited later on. The team is benefiting from that patient system, and the results have been encouraging.

“You don’t know who’s gonna be on the team when you start, so it’s really how do

you maximize what you have,” head coach Mark Daigneault said. “And

everything we’re doing now has evolved to this point.

“The cutting is a problem; there were players who were just piling on Shai instead of guarding.” It’s like, “All right, where should we space them?” That teaches us various things, including the cutting triggers. Having shooting fives, undersized fives, and non-fives playing the five gave rise to the guard-to-guard situations. We have gradually encountered obstacles and worked out solutions.

Oklahoma City is second in the NBA in field goal percentage (50.7%), third in 3-point percentage (39.2%), and third in points per game (122.5). The Thunder shoot 83.8% from the free throw line, which is the second-best percentage in the NBA, and commit the fourth fewest turnovers in the league. The offensive scheme has proved nearly impossible to stop, and the NBA as a whole is still searching for solutions.

But this was Oklahoma City’s strategy all along. They now have the necessary parts to complete the puzzle. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the main focus, of course, but everyone else now understands their place in the story.

We nurture and preserve the positive things in our lives. It simply becomes your configuration. Our system will appear different in a year. We aspire to be a dynamic, problem-solving team of coaches and athletes. This was not something we scribbled on a napkin.”