For the last few years, the Las Vegas Raiders have not been a very good football team. They’ve won just 18 combined games over the last three seasons, the sixth-fewest in the NFL. They also won just four last season, finishing tied for the fourth-worst record in the NFL (behind three teams that won three games). Over the longer term, the Raiders have been even worse. They’ve been to the playoffs just twice since 2002, and only the decrepit Cleveland Browns have a worse record during that span.
But star edge rusher Maxx Crosby sees hope in the Raiders’ situation, inspired by another team that not so long ago was losing a lot of games but recently climbed the mountain and won a championship: the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder.
“We just saw it in the NBA: OKC, just a couple years ago, was one of the worst teams in the league,” Crosby said, per The Athletic. “But they had a lot of young guys, they trusted the process, they developed and now they’re the world champions. We’re trying to win. I want to win so badly. I put everything into it. I want everybody else to think like that. And that’s been my goal, just bringing as many guys along as I possibly can.”
Crosby’s right. The Thunder went 22-50 in the COVID-shortened 2021 season, then 24-58 and 2022. They somewhat surprisingly showed dramatic improvement in 2023, going 40-42 and losing in the play-in tournament. The last two years, they have won the top seed in the Western Conference, going 57-25 in 2024 and 68-14 in 2025. In the latter season, they had the best point differential of all time and won the first title in OKC history, led by the league’s MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) and one of the best defenses in recent memory.
The Raiders … are not in the same position as the Thunder. At least not in the one the Thunder were in coming into the 2024-25 season. Oklahoma City had just won 57 games and lost in the second round of the playoffs to the eventual Western Conference champions, was armed with a player who had just finished second in MVP voting (SGA) and two worthy co-stars with…
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