Thunder lead the league
The Oklahoma City Thunder are being talked about as the first team to finish with the NBA's best regular‑season record in consecutive years since the 2019–20 Bucks — a rare level of consistency. (x.com) Oklahoma City's run is anchored by Shai Gilgeous‑Alexander, who extended a streak to 140 straight games scoring 20+ points, and the league's Play‑In schedule has just been released on Prime as teams finalize seeding. (x.com) (x.com)
Oklahoma City just locked up the National Basketball Association’s best record again, which means the Thunder will enter the playoffs with home-court advantage against every team in the league after beating the Los Angeles Clippers on April 8 to move to 64-16. (nba.com) (espn.com) That kind of repeat is rare because the regular season is 82 games long, injuries pile up, and even great teams usually slip a few wins from one year to the next. Yahoo Sports noted Oklahoma City is the first team since the 2019-20 Milwaukee Bucks to finish with the league’s top regular-season record in back-to-back years. (sports.yahoo.com) (basketball-reference.com) The engine of it is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who pushed his streak to 140 straight games with at least 20 points. National Basketball Association coverage earlier this season tracked him tying Wilt Chamberlain at 126 straight before he passed the mark two days later. (nba.com 1) (nba.com 2) That streak matters because it changes how Oklahoma City plays every night: the Thunder can pencil in a 20-point floor from their lead scorer and build the rest of the offense around that certainty. His game log on the official league and team sites shows the streak stretching across the end of last season and deep into this one. (espn.com) (nba.com) The supporting cast has made the repeat possible too, and the April 8 win over the Clippers showed the formula in one box score. Chet Holmgren finished with 30 points and 14 rebounds in that game, while Oklahoma City held Los Angeles to 110 points and extended its winning streak to seven. (espn.com) (nba.com) Now the calendar shifts from chasing seeding to surviving the Play-In Tournament, which is the mini-round for teams ranked seventh through tenth in each conference. The National Basketball Association lists April 12 as the last day of the regular season, April 14 through April 17 for the Play-In Tournament, and April 18 for the start of the playoffs. (nba.com) The current bracket shows how far ahead Oklahoma City is from that scramble. As of the league’s April 9 Play-In page, the Thunder sit first in the West at 63-16 on that bracket snapshot, while teams like the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Clippers, Portland Trail Blazers, and Golden State Warriors are the ones fighting around the Play-In line. (nba.com) That is the split that defines the West right now: Oklahoma City is spending its final games tuning up for a long playoff run, while the middle of the conference is still trying to avoid a sudden-death week. The Thunder’s next listed game is at Denver on Friday, April 10, one of the last tune-ups before the bracket becomes real. (nba.com) (espn.com) So the story is not just that Oklahoma City won a lot of games again. It is that the Thunder turned last year’s top seed into this year’s top record too, with a 140-game scoring metronome in Gilgeous-Alexander and enough depth to make the rest of the conference play extra games just to get a shot at them. (sports.yahoo.com) (nba.com)
