What makes an all-time NBA team? Is it a roster filled with all-time talent? Is it a pure numbers game: wins, point differentials, efficiency rankings, etc.? The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors would like to know if failing to finish an all-time season with a title excludes you from this conversation.
That’s an important word. Conversation. That’s all this is. We can’t line up the Jordan-Pippen Bulls against the Curry-Thompson Warriors and actually find out which team was better. What we can say is both these teams, and certainly a handful of others, are in the all-time conversation.
And now our question is this: Does this Oklahoma City Thunder team that just defeated the Indiana Pacers in seven games for the 2025 NBA title belong as well?
From a dynastic standpoint, it’s obviously premature to answer yes to that question. There’s no doubt that the Thunder — as the youngest team to win a championship since the 1977 Trail Blazers, and with a league-high 13 first-round draft picks in their war chest between now and 2031 — are set up to win multiple titles. But until they actually do, which will be easier said than done in what has become the deepest and most equitable landscape in NBA history, particularly in the Western Conference, they cannot be in that conversation.
But from a single-season standpoint? That’s a different conversation, and through any sort of objective lens, it would be almost impossible to keep the Thunder out of it. To put OKC’s place in history into perspective, let’s start with some numbers and then go from there.
84
Only four teams in history have topped the 68 regular-season wins that Oklahoma City piled up this year. Add the 16 postseason wins, and that’s 84 total victories. Only two teams have surpassed that number, and one of them, the 2015-16 Warriors, who won 88 games after a record-setting 73-win regular season, didn’t finish the deal with a championship. The other was the ’95-96 Bulls, who won 87 games (the ’96-97 Bulls matched OKC’s 84 wins).
There’s some important context here. The NBA…
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