Thunder vs. Spurs is the NBA’s first true post-Splash Bros dynasty war
The Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs spent a decade evolving in the shadow of the dynasty Warriors. Now their historic Western Conference Finals collision feels like the future of the NBA.
There are playoff series that feel important because of stakes, and then there are playoff series that feel important because they reveal where basketball is headed next.
Thunder-Spurs belongs in the second category.
Not because Oklahoma City won 64 games or because San Antonio has a seven-foot-four basketball apocalypse roaming the paint. Not because Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the reigning back-to-back MVP or because Victor Wembanyama already looks like he was designed in a government lab after somebody fed Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and alien DNA into a supercomputer. Those things matter, but they aren’t what makes this feel historic.
What makes this series feel different is that both franchises were forged by the exact same trauma. The Golden State Warriors happened to them.
Back in the 2010s, the Oklahoma City Thunder looked like the future of basketball. Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, and Serge Ibaka tore through the West young enough to make the rest of the league sick with envy. They knocked out Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavericks, Kobe Bryant’s Lakers, and Tim Duncan’s Spurs in a single postseason run, prompting Gregg Popovich to call it “a Hollywood script.” The assumption around the league wasn’t whether OKC would become a dynasty. It was how many championships they were about to win.
The Spurs, meanwhile, were already the standard every competent organization was desperately trying to imitate. Five championships in fifteen years. Tim Duncan operating like some silent basketball warlord while Popovich turned role players into infrastructure. Before the Warriors became the Warriors, Golden State was basically a live scrimmage for San Antonio. The Warriors weren’t rivals yet. They were small speedbumps on the way to greatness.
Then Steph Curry and the Warriors broke the ecosystem.
Not just by winning titles. By forcing the rest of basketball to mutate around them.
That’s why this Thunder-Spurs matchup feels bigger than a normal conference finals. These aren’t just two young contenders colliding. These are two franchises that spent the last decade rebuilding themselves in the shadow of Golden State’s dynasty, trying to engineer answers to a basketball problem that once looked unsolvable.
This thing is historic.
What Both Teams Became
Look at what both franchises built from the wreckage.
The Thunder are now constructed around suffocating defensive versatility, overwhelming pace, elite guard creation, and waves of interchangeable athletes who can be deployed in any combination. The Spurs have a one-of-one player in Wemby anchoring lineups full of athletic creators, corner-three assassins, and rangy defenders flying around him. Both teams weaponize spacing. Both prioritize connective decision-making. Both can switch actions without immediately springing leaks. Spurs’ guards are so dominant with the ball in their hands they are being called the Slash Bros, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the original Splash Bros of Curry and Klay Thompson.
These are descendants of the Warriors apocalypse.
The irony runs deep if you zoom out far enough. The Warriors were partially born from San Antonio in the first place. Steve Kerr imported many of Popovich’s principles (ball movement, player movement, joy, selflessness) and fused them with Steph Curry’s gravitational madness. The result wasn’t just another champion. It was a basketball superweapon. Traditional centers looked slower overnight. Isolation-heavy offenses started feeling prehistoric. Entire defensive schemes became vulnerable to one man pulling from thirty feet while sprinting around moving bodies like a nuclear Reggie Miller.
The Warriors didn’t just take the throne from the Spurs. They changed what the throne even was. And then they ruined the end of Kawhi Leonard’s tenure their, the original true heir to the Robinson/Duncan/Ginobili/Parker throne. #manslaughter
Oklahoma City felt that transformation more brutally than anyone.
The Thunder were supposed to own the future. Instead, the future got stolen from them in real time. They blew a 3-1 lead to Golden State in the 2016 Western Conference Finals after pushing the 73-win Warriors to the brink in what Andre Iguodala later called the toughest opponent Golden State faced that postseason. Then Durant crossed enemy lines and joined the very machine that had just survived them. The Warriors didn’t merely defeat OKC. They assimilated their best player and became the fully realized version of what the Thunder thought they were building all along.
San Antonio’s unraveling was slower, sadder, almost geological.
The Spurs survived the Warriors’ initial rise. Hell, they even punched Golden State in the mouth on opening night after Durant arrived. But eventually the pressure cracked the foundation. Duncan retired. Manu retired. Tony Parker left. Kawhi Leonard, the heir apparent, the next dynasty cornerstone, wanted out. The old Spurs machine finally stopped humming at championship frequency. As one old Golden State of Mind piece put it, the Warriors kept pounding and pounding until the rock finally broke.
Now look at where we are.
Four years removed from Golden State’s last title, the Thunder are the defending champions with a back-to-back MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Spurs are the terrifying young challenger with Wembanyama, the Defensive Player of the Year and maybe the most structurally absurd basketball player the league has ever seen.
And then ESPN dropped their deep dive on this series, and wow, check this out. According to ESPN Research, this Western Conference Finals is the first playoff matchup this century between two teams with 62-plus wins, SHEESH. It’s apparently also the seventh time in NBA history it’s ever happened. The previous six produced moments like Michael Jordan’s last shot, the Flu Game, Magic vs. Bird.
The Thunder went 64-18 while he Spurs went 62-20. Not anywhere close to 73 wins but not bad! Both teams entered these playoffs on historic hot streaks, the Thunder on a 19-1 regular season closing run before going 8-0 in the playoffs, the Spurs on a 30-3 closing run before going 8-3. Their combined playoff point differentials are absurd. Plus-16.6 for OKC and plus-15.9 for San Antonio.
These numbers aren’t describing a good series. They’re describing a collision between two of the best teams the league has assembled in a generation.
And both of them are young. Spurs’ guard De’Aaron Fox and former Warriors champion Harrison Barnes look like grandfathers next to these young cats. This isn’t just a great conference finals. This is probably the first chapter of the next decade.
This series has enough variables to fill a whiteboard and enough star power to fill an arena twice over. And hovering over all of it, quietly, is Golden State.
Steph is aging while Draymond is also, much like the rest of us since the dynasty started, older. Kerr still standing on the sidelines after signing another extension, watching the league his dynasty helped reshape continue evolving without them. The Warriors went 37-45 this season. Curry missed nearly half the year. They’re no longer the empire at the center of the map. They’re the civilization whose ruins everybody built on top of. That’s what makes this series feel almost poetic from the Bay Area perspective.
The Warriors spent a decade forcing the rest of basketball to adapt or die. Oklahoma City adapted. San Antonio adapted. And now, years after Golden State submerged both franchises headfirst into the cold Splash of the Bay, the league finally gets to see what survived the flood.
Now could either of these teams beat the 2017 Hamptons 5 team in the playoffs? Absolutely not, they wouldn’t win a postseason single game against that squad. But hey, that’s a conversation for a bar near you.
In the meantime, let’s enjoy this Dub Nation, this couldn’t have happened without the Warriors ruining the league first. Cheers!
Strategically, OKC had good stretches guarding W with a small while preventing the post entry to Wemby and stripping his dribble. At the very end, SAS somehow spread out the OKC forest of arms, leading to post entry, leading to Wemby dominance.
How can you not like Wemby? He's a psycho. And we here demonstrably like psychos.