Is it possible to create the perfect basketball ecosystem? If you line everything up just right, personalities and talents and towels and basketballs, will the product on the court inevitably become as pure and consistent as its surroundings?
Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein and I are having a conversation in the courtside chairs in the practice facility when he notices a basketball on the rack near us as ever-so-slightly off-kilter, its Wilson logo tilted at most 10 degrees. Hartenstein points at the offending ball and says, without a hint of sarcasm, "That'll be fixed before we finish talking." He is nearly right; as he walks across the court toward the locker after we are done, an equipment manager comes by. He tilts the rogue ball back into place by putting a hand on each side, as if cupping an injured bird.
IT SEEMS ALMOST too good to be true, this alternate reality where every piece fits and nobody wants the credit.
...content to sublimate their egos for the betterment of this [team.]
...this team's joyful selflessness...
"There's a standard everybody here conforms to," All-Star center Chet Holmgren...
Games at Paycom Center take place in an atmosphere of extremely loud reverence. The near-continuous "OKC!" chant -- often celebratory, occasionally exhortative, rarely pleading -- seems to rise from the depths, starting innocently and climbing until it feels hallucinatory, almost religious.
Gilgeous-Alexander, the presumptive repeat MVP and someone Daigneault describes as "surgically consistent," tells me he approaches each day with the intent to "be professional, and don't think you're better than somebody because you're better at some thing," [italics in original]
...when reserve guard Isaiah Joe is asked to describe the team's mindset, he says, "One band, one sound, and we all have a like mind like a beehive."
There's a level of maturity at work here that is both admirable and genuinely mystifying among a group of wildly successful young men in their early- to mid-20s.
It's enough to make you wonder what they're hiding.
...this organization is so clinical in its excellence...
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OK OKC, you are officially my least-favorite franchise.
