Ranking the 6 Biggest Threats Right Now To Dethrone OKC Thunder as NBA Champions
Propelled by likely back-to-back MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the best defense in the league, the Oklahoma City Thunder have retained title-favorite status throughout a season marred by multiple injuries and the ascent of several new powerhouses around the league.
Oklahoma City is the only team winning its games by a double-digit average. It is in no real danger of finishing the regular season anywhere other than atop the West standings.
Though the all-time wins record many foresaw is out of reach, the Thunder are still the target at which every other contender is aiming.
To beat OKC, it'll take otherworldly perimeter defense and a poised, diverse attack that can withstand hellacious pressure. The Thunder are dominant enough to win games in the unlikely event SGA has an off night. That's been true even when injuries to Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren, Isaiah Hartenstein, and others have left them at less than full strength.
It'll be a tall task, but a handful of teams have a better shot at knocking off the Thunder than most. Let's see who profiles as OKC's greatest threat.
Honorable Mention
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Los Angeles Lakers
The Lakers are peaking at the right time, and Luka Dončić gives them a shot to excel offensively against any opponent. But you'd have a hard time finding a team with worse options to throw at the Thunder's top scorers on D.
Marcus Smart is playing better than he has at any point in the last three seasons, but he can't slow down SGA on his own. The Thunder will relentlessly attack Dončić, Austin Reaves, and LeBron James, and Deandre Ayton has no chance to clean up the messes inside.
New York Knicks
A tough omission, the Knicks have far better odds of slowing the Thunder down than the Lakers do. OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges are better on the wing than any starter in Los Angeles, though Karl-Anthony Towns' interior defense is even less imposing than Ayton's.
Jalen Brunson is going to see a cavalcade of elite defenders throughout a potential series. The rest of the Knicks won't be able to take up the playmaking and scoring slack if OKC completely takes him out of the action.
Unless Mitchell Robinson is grabbing 10 offensive boards per game, the Knicks won't be able to score enough to win.
6. Minnesota Timberwolves
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It wasn't easy to pick the Minnesota Timberwolves over the New York Knicks or Los Angeles Lakers, but back-to-back Conference Finals appearances and a defensive makeup that gives it a shot against OKC's top scoring threats broke the three-way tie.
Anthony Edwards will have to be fully healthy after missing time with knee soreness for any of this to be plausible, but there's a world where he and Jaden McDaniels make life just tough enough on Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams to escape with a series victory.
Rudy Gobert would also have to dominate the interior and avoid short-circuiting his own team's offense. We've seen the Thunder look a little overmatched inside whenever Isaiah Hartenstein isn't at his best.
The Wolves are in the midst of a tough stretch in March, one made tougher by Edwards' absence. But they've made deep runs in each of the past two postseasons, tending to play their best when they have no other choice, and logged two wins against the Thunder during the 2025-26 regular season.
This one is a long shot, but a puncher's chance is better than no chance at all.
5. Cleveland Cavaliers
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James Harden wasn't on the roster for the Cleveland Cavaliers' first loss of the season to OKC, but he was there for the 121-113 defeat on Feb. 22. In good news for the Cavs, that was only a single-digit loss in a game where they fell behind by 20 points in the early going and fought back to tie late in the third quarter. Maybe that resilience will give Cleveland confidence.
Slight problem: Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams both missed that game with injuries. Chances are, they'll make it a little tougher for the Cavs to climb out of a 20-point hole than Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe did.
Donovan Mitchell's playoff track record is dotted with exceptional scoring efforts. It's possible he'll have a couple of those in store for the Thunder if they meet in the Finals. If the Cavs advance that far, it'll almost certainly mean Mitchell will have avoided the wear and tear that typically breaks him down in the playoffs and, more importantly, that Harden has bucked his career-long trend of no-showing in big games.
Harden and Mitchell give Cleveland the offensive engine necessary to make Oklahoma City's defense work. The Evan Mobley-Jarrett Allen frontcourt could match up well with Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein.
Oklahoma City's ultimate advantage is all about the depth of its personnel. The Thunder will never run out of good defenders to throw at Cleveland's playmakers, but the Cavs have virtually no one to slow down SGA and Williams if both are healthy.
4. Detroit Pistons
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Officiating will play a significant role if the Detroit Pistons and Thunder collide in the Finals, as two of the league's elite defenses will foul each other on every play and wait to see how tightly things are called.
Whenever the Pistons are involved, extreme physicality is a given, and the potential for fisticuffs will be high. Add postseason intensity to the mix, and the combustion potential skyrockets—probably as the scoring averages plummet.
The Pistons could give OKC a knock-down, drag-out war like few others. If Detroit gets a chance to visit all that meanness on the Thunder, it'll be after they've survived the West gauntlet. Banged up all year, Oklahoma City might also be suffering from severe exhaustion by the time they see the Pistons in June.
Detroit's case is only as strong as its offense, which has been a trouble spot all year. The Thunder can give as good as they get on D, and Cade Cunningham's one-man show almost certainly won't be enough to keep Detroit's attack on course. In fact, there's a great chance some other team in the East capitalizes on an anemic offensive supporting cast and knocks the Pistons out before they get a shot at OKC.
Perhaps most importantly, if the collapsed lung currently sidelining Cunningham for "an extended period of time" is a factor in the postseason, you can forget about Detroit posing a threat to almost anyone, let alone the defending champions.
3. Denver Nuggets
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A three-point road loss, sealed by two improbable late-game daggers by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, shouldn't feel quite as decisive as it did. But that contest against the Denver Nuggets on Mar. 9 highlighted some of the core issues that could await Nikola Jokic and Co. if they see the Thunder in the postseason.
Jokic's defense simply isn't up to snuff right now. Whether it's the result of the knee injury that cost him time earlier this year or the physical decline that comes for all players over 30, the three-time MVP simply wasn't able to make an impact against OKC, which was playing without Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren, and a number of other key threats.
The Nuggets seem likely to keep doubling Gilgeous-Alexander and then hoping to rotate quickly enough to contest clean looks. SGA's 15 assists against them on Mar. 9 were a season high, and most of them were very low stress.
The bet here is on Jokić reasserting himself as the best player alive during the playoffs. He's on the short list of guys who could carry his team to a series win against OKC by himself. Peyton Watson's return from a hamstring injury, Aaron Gordon's continued recovery from his own hammy strain, and Jamal Murray's penchant for big playoff performances all give Denver a fighting chance.
Denver's dearth of reliable two-way wings, limited options to throw at SGA on D, and Jokić's personal defensive struggles make it hard to see the Nuggets giving a full-strength Thunder team much of a run. But you can't just ignore Jokić's ability to dominate, the Nuggets' championship pedigree, and last postseason's seven-game war between these two teams.
2. Boston Celtics
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Jayson Tatum's return injects some wild-card energy into a potential Finals meeting between the Boston Celtics and the Thunder.
Tatum isn't exactly an unknown commodity. He won a ring in 2024 and made the All-NBA First Team in the four seasons prior to this one. His late-season reintroduction to a Celtics team that seemed to be wildly overachieving without him and was already getting fringe-MVP contributions from Jaylen Brown makes Boston a threat to absolutely everyone.
A Mar. 12 meeting in OKC didn't illuminate much, as neither Tatum nor Derrick White suited up for the Celtics. On the other side, Isaiah Hartenstein and Jalen Williams sat out with injuries. Take what you will from a two-point Thunder win in that one. We know that nearly half of the relevant playoff starters didn't participate.
In theory, Boston's championship experience and glut of defenders who'd be at least viable against SGA give it a couple of real selling points. It's asking a lot of young players like Hugo Gonzalez, Jordan Walsh, and Baylor Scheierman to play well against a team as overwhelming as the Thunder, but Boston has seen all three perform during the regular season.
If Boston has an exploitable weakness, it's probably a big man rotation that gets pretty iffy after Neemias Queta.
1. San Antonio Spurs
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Going by record alone, the San Antonio Spurs are indisputably the biggest threat to the Thunder. Minnesota has two wins over the Thunder, but the Spurs are a more compelling 4-1.
Victor Wembanyama averaged 18.4 points, 9.2 rebounds, and 1.2 blocks against the Thunder in those five meetings, but he put up those numbers in just 25.1 minutes per game while shooting 52.4 percent from the field and 62.5 percent from deep. San Antonio's plus/minus was a whopping plus-10.0 points per game with Wemby on the floor.
Perhaps most concerning for the Thunder, Wembanyama and Stephon Castle led a defense that held the defending champs to minimal offensive production in four of the five meetings. The Thunder's lone win on Jan. 13 saw them score 127.5 points per 100 possessions, an 84th-percentile output based on this year's league-wide scoring numbers. In the other four, OKC scored at rates that ranked in the 22nd, 48th, 14th, and 10th percentiles.
If Oklahoma City is vulnerable, it's on offense. Between Wembanyama's complete ownership of the lane, Stephon Castle's perimeter work, and some very troubling numbers over a large sample, it looks like the Thunder have real issues scoring against San Antonio.
If anyone's going to stop the reigning champs from going back-to-back, it'll be Wembanyama and the rising Spurs.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
