All season long, the Oklahoma City Thunder have been laying waste to the rest of the NBA. For just as long, many NBA fans have dismissed them because “they haven’t done it in the playoffs.” The NBA Finals begin tonight, and the Thunder are not only there, they’re huge favorites over the Indiana Pacers.
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It may have taken awhile, but people are finally coming around to the fact that this team is pretty special. OKC’s record for the season, including the playoffs, is 80-18, which puts them in some pretty rarefied air. Their 40 regular season wins by 15 points or more are the most in NBA history, and their +12.9 point differential is also the best ever.
Skip Bayless has been singing the Thunder’s praises since before the season even started, and now he’s taking credit for driving people away from appreciating them sooner.
“I do take some responsibility for this,” Skip said on yesterday’s episode of The Skip Bayless Show. “I do bear some guilt for this national narrative, or lack thereof. I have been driving the Thunder bandwagon all season long, since I picked them to win the loaded Western Conference before the season began.”
“I’m sure this drove some people nuts, helped drive the Thunder bandwagon right off of the cliff, because some Skip haters out there condemned me as a bandwagon jumper,” he continued.
It’s a perfect Skip Bayless moment to put himself at the center of the story, but the Thunder are a small-market team, and after last year’s flame-out in the Western Conference semis (when they were also the No. 1 seed), people were right to be suspicious of trusting them again. Credit to them for being on the verge of breaking through.
Skip put this Thunder team in lofty company when he said, “The Thunder are the most astonishing basketball team I’ve seen since Michael Jordan’s 1998 Bulls.” Even forgetting that this is Warriors erasure, his own words should show him why people didn’t join the OKC lovefest sooner.
Michael Jordan was viewed as “just a scorer” for years, and certainly not a winning player, because he and his Bulls were unable to get over the hump against the Eastern Conference’s best teams. The Bad Boy-era Detroit Pistons in particular had their number, and it wasn’t until MJ and the Bulls overcame that team that they were really minted for greatness.
LeBron James has four rings, but he’s still had to fend off over two decades of hate from Skip himself. Odd for someone who said on this podcast, “I thought America loved awe-inspiring. I thought fans were magnetized by seeing something in sports that they’ve never seen before.”
Every team has doubters, even the great ones, until they prove them wrong. People didn’t think a jump-shooting team could win a title. Then the Warriors did. Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks couldn’t win the big one. Until they did.
The cycle goes round and round, and the Thunder are merely the most recent victims of it. If they finish the job by beating the Pacers, Skip won’t have to worry, because the bandwagon will be overflowing.
