One thing is for sure, I’d the continue to improve upon how they finished the season, there is no reason for them to not finish with 30 wins and even flirt with 40 or a bottom playoff seed.

An elite team can blow out opponents or win by a slim margin, but a win is a win. To think that a team can win or lose X close games … that would assume that all teams play a similar number of close games. I’m not sure exactly what the statistics are there, but I think it’s probably not accurate to assume that.

Games that “could have gone either way” at the end of the day failed to go their way … which doesn’t really allow us to extrapolate one way or the other on it (I think … I haven’t gone and read otherwise, but over the course of 82 games [and more] the variability starts to go down). If one thinks the last season was a total fluke, you stlil are only more likely to regress towards a mean of winning X number of those assumed not-winning games, not flip that ridiculously to one side.

Finally, the team didn’t exactly outperform Pythag W/L expectations.

That said, the team is pretty likely to do quite a bit better this year based on end of year improvement, roster refinement, and so forth. It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out.

It seems like to me that this upcoming year, more than any other year in semi-recent history, has the finals already set. It seems like there are 2 teams from the West and 3 teams from the East that can reach the finals, maybe 5 from the West (Denver and Portland?).
Does the fact that you pretty much have no chance of sniffing the finals damper your spirits, or are most of you at ‘baby steps mode’ where little improvement in every area is the key, because it won’t really matter how good the Thunder are until Durant hits his prime (approximately year 5)?

the Thunder are a Finals team either. I also think we’re in the early part of a building process.

That being said, I dismiss the notion that the Finals are “set”. Everyone thought the Finals were set this year with LA and Cleveland, but that didn’t happen.

Sure, there are teams who are prohibitive favorites, but you never know until you play the games.

No one expected the University of Utah to go undefeated and win a BCS game, but they did.

The great thing about sports is anything can happen. You have to account for injuries, chemistry, momentum and plain old luck.

Here’s a hypothetical,. let’s say the Thunder slip in to the playoffs at number 8. Can OKC beat the Lakers in a series? Most of us would say no. But what if Kobe goes down with an injury? Can OKC win that series. Yeah, I think they can. Next thing you know, they’re in the second round. Even without an injury, it’s still possible. Just ask the Mavericks.

So, while I’m not holding my breath that the Thunder will even make the playoffs, I will root for them in every game as if they have a chance to win it.

on Basketball Reference for 2008-2009 Thunder Stats the OKC Thunder went 7-13 in games decided by four points. Not sure where the 19 losses comes from unless my dataset is wrong or I calculated incorrectly.