OKC Thunder: A Small-Market Heavy Hitter

Historically, a small-market NBA team reaching the NBA Finals could be seen as a seldom occurrence.

With less resources financially, a significant lack of exposure on the national scale among its own league, and of course, as the Oklahoma City Thunder have witnessed first hand—an inability to retain top-level talent—you could bet that small-market squads will have a much tougher time reaching the heights of a stage such as the NBA Finals.

Teams like Oklahoma City and the San Antonio Spurs have defied those odds within the past two decades though, possessing high-level talent and outstanding management and coaching. Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobli and Gregg Popovich on the Spurs' side led to four NBA titles and five Finals appearances from 2000-2014, illustrating how a small market can take over the league with the right balance of talent, loyalty and cohesion amongst an entire team.

Those stars aligned for San Antonio, a team that currently ranks at the bottom of the league in TV market size and metro population, but it didn't quite go that nicely for a young, budding Thunder team as it made strides when coming from Seattle to Oklahoma City in 2008.

The Thunder, a bottom-five market in the NBA, got a hold of three future MVPs at the same time in Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant and James Harden—the first full-blown signal of Sam Presti's greatness—who took them to the NBA Finals for the team's first-ever appearance.

Against the likes of LeBron James and the Miami Heat, the Thunder were bounced out in five games. Despite making the Western Conference Finals a plethora of times throughout Westbrook's and Durant's tenure while Harden's was short lived, Oklahoma City could not replicate its early success to reach the NBA Finals once more.

As a result, Durant's frustration bloomed on this team, and let to his ultimate departure to a budding dynasty in the Golden State Warriors, leaving behind a sour taste in Thunder fans' mouths as he would go on to claim two championships with the Warriors in 2017 and 2018.

Presti continued to work his magic, going out and getting Paul George from the Indiana Pacers to complement Westbrook and even grabbing Carmelo Anthony in hopes to claim a title from that group, but to no avail. Was he discouraged? Not even a little.

Turning Paul George into Oklahoma City's now third-ever MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, along with Jalen Williams. Pair that with its lottery pick with Chet Holmgren in 2022, and Presti and the Thunder is now back in the driver's seat, looking as comfortable and confident as ever to claim its first NBA Championship for the city—despite being of the smallest-market franchises in the league.

Now, back on center stage, the Thunder will look to take on the Pacers in a small-market NBA Finals, possibly marking the smallest-market matchup in NBA history.