The Oklahoma City Thunder produced the NBA’s best defense throughout the regular season, and have done the same during these playoffs as well.
Now, on the league’s biggest stage in the NBA Finals, they’re ready to show the Pacers why they’re ‘special’ on that end of the court.
‘I think our defense is special because we don’t have no weak links,’ center Isaiah Hartenstein told international media Sunday on a Zoom call.
‘Because normally teams can kind of go out and hunt one player. We don’t really have that that much.
‘We’re a really together team,’ he continued at a different point. ‘We support each other. If you’re playing a lot of minutes, if you’re not playing a lot of minutes. I think that’s what makes it special, is we’re very supportive of each other.
‘And then when it gets on the court, we’re always connected defensively, we’re connected offensively, we’re connected. And I think that’s what makes it hard to play against us, because no one’s ever not on the same same page.’
Isaiah Hartenstein is seen with the Western Conference Championship trophy after the Thunder beat the Timberwolves
Hartenstein has been a huge part of the Thunder’s stifling defense this season
The Thunder – the youngest Finals team since the 1977 Blazers – have seen their national profile rise in this postseason, though the foundations for such a run have been there the entire season.
Mark Daigneault’s squad led the league with a historically-good 68 regular season wins, have an MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and a swarm of defensive stoppers like Hartenstein, Lu Dort and Alex Caruso.
The last two series, though, have been a real statement to the league and its fans.
Three-time MVP Nikola Jokic and proverbial ‘future face of the league’ candidate Anthony Edwards were both made to look ordinary at times, and Gilgeous-Alexander came through in big moments.
But Hartenstein knows the Pacers will present a fresh set of challenges.
‘It’s a new series. You have to prove yourself again,’ he said.
‘And we’re not really kind of buying into who’s the favorite, not the favorite. We want to go out there starting from 0-0, and you have to prove ourselves.’
The Thunder have in fact opened up as extremely lopsided favorites, though the Pacers enter their first Finals since 2000 after making quite an announcement of their own to the league.
Tyrese Haliburton – voted the league’s ‘most overrated player’ by his peers not long ago – proved to be anything but, while Pascal Siakam showed the championship pedigree that helped him win a ring with the Raptors in 2019.
Indiana showed just how potent their offense was when they gashed the usually-stingy Knicks for 125 points in the Game 6 Eastern Conference Finals clincher (and 130-plus in two other games), and their penchant for pace will be something for OKC to keep an eye on.
Hartenstein, for his part, mentioned that the Thunder would need to slow them down and beat them on the boards inside.
The Thunder will hope newly-crowned MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander can rise to the occasion
Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort have both seen the team grow since arriving in OKC in 2019
For the former Knicks star, things have progressed rather quickly since he joined the team in free agency last summer.
Jalen Williams, too, has mostly known winning since the team drafted him in 2022, while Chet Holmgren (who missed his true rookie season through injury) has a fairly staggering regular season record of 83-31.
Dort, though, was in OKC as the team team barely broke 20 wins per year through 2020-22, and tried to rebuild itself post-Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.
As the team’s longest tenured player (Gilgeous-Alexander joined him via trade on the same day in July 2019), he can now look at the team’s Finals berth through the lens of that journey.
‘When I first got here, we all had a vision… and I feel like, you know, we checked a lot of those boxes to get to the point we have today,’ Dort said. ‘You know, credit to our organization, and coaching staff, and then the players that’s been here, it really shaped all of us to get to this point.
‘It would mean a lot to get it done, not just for us, but for the city, for the organization. I mean, we just put so much work to this. And now we’re so close to the end. So we gotta think about everything, use all that motivation to get it done.’
The Thunder will host Game 1 of the Finals on Friday.
