The Oklahoma City Thunder exited Game 1 of the 2025 Western Conference semifinals with plenty of reasons to feel unhappy. When you blow a 14-point, second-half lead, give up a 19-6 run over the final four and a half minutes of the fourth quarter, deliberately give your opponent two chances to cut into your lead with the clock turned off in the final 15 seconds, miss a pair of clutch free throws, give up a game-winning 3-pointer, and lose the home-court advantage you spent six months fighting to earn, there’s a lot not to like; it’s not exactly a fun time out at the ballpark.
And yet, there was Thunder MVP finalist Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, taking the podium after the shocking loss and making the affirmative choice to look on the bright side of life. From Tim MacMahon of ESPN:
“It should be fun,” Gilgeous-Alexander said after the Thunder’s first loss this postseason. “We’re going to find out what we’re made of, what we’re really made of. Nobody expected it to be smooth sailing this whole journey. No journey in life is, and we know that. Today’s a bump in the road — unexpected. No one expects to lose, especially that way, but it’s the game of life. So it’s about how you respond to getting knocked down.”
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Oklahoma City didn’t get knocked down much during the regular season — a historically excellent campaign that saw the Thunder become just the seventh NBA team ever to win at least 68 games, turn in the best era-adjusted net rating since the 1996 Bulls, and roll up the highest average margin of victory of all time. The only dalliances that Gilgeous-Alexander and Co. had with adversity during their first-round series of the Grizzlies came when Memphis built a 28-point lead in the first half of Game 3 … only to see star point guard Ja Morant go down with a hip injury, setting the stage for OKC to pull off one of the biggest comebacks in NBA playoff history, before finishing off a sweep.
“We have to embrace the struggle of the playoffs, embrace the adversity of the playoffs,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault told reporters. “The playoffs are a mountain to climb, so it’s not gonna be easy for anybody. We kind of coasted through the first round. It was challenging in the games, but we had control of the series the whole time. But no one just walks their way through a series at this point in the season.”
On the rare occasions that they did get knocked down, though, the Thunder have tended to get off the mat with a flourish. Oklahoma City lost consecutive games just twice all season: to the Mavericks and Spurs in November, when it was without injured big men Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein; and to the Rockets and Lakers in April, after OKC had already sewn up the West’s No. 1 seed. Outside of those two sets, the Thunder have responded to a loss by winning, and winning big — by an average of 17.5 points, with a handful of 20-plus-point blowouts.
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That forceful a bounce-back will be tough to come by against a Nuggets team led by Nikola Jokić, who patiently pulverized the Holmgren-Hartenstein front line — and every other defender that Daigneault threw at him — to the tune of 42 points, 22 rebounds and six assists in a command performance.
“He is the best player in the world,” Nuggets guard (and beloved former Thunder superstar) Russell Westbrook told reporters after the win. “Plain and simple.”
That’s the crown that Gilgeous-Alexander wants to wear: the title he’s worked the last two seasons to assume, the rarefied air he yearns to breathe. What he produced in Game 1 — 33 points on 12-for-26 shooting, 10 rebounds, eight assists, two steals, a block and just one turnover in 40 minutes, with 11 points in the fourth, including a pair of clutch free throws and a driving dunk in the final 15 seconds — would be good enough to beat most teams on most nights.
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But Game 1 — with the Thunder shooting just 38% from the floor in the second half and mustering just one made field goal in the final three minutes; with the league’s best free-throw-shooting team leaving eight points at the line, headlined by Holmgren’s missed pair with 9.5 ticks left — wasn’t most nights. And even coming off a grueling seven-game slugfest against the Clippers, with just one game between rounds, Jokić, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon and the championship-forged Nuggets aren’t most teams.
Knocking them off will require the best that Oklahoma City has to offer — a higher level of two-way, 48-minute lock-in than has typically been required during this magical run. The Nuggets expect to see it on Wednesday in Game 2.
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“We have to not be satisfied,” Nuggets forward Peyton Watson told reporters. “We know how dangerous they are as a team.”
If the Thunder didn’t know how dangerous the Nuggets are, they do now. What they do with that information could go a long way toward determining whether we wind up viewing Game 1 as a speed bump or a roadblock.
“We didn’t expect our whole run to be sunshine and rainbows,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. Game 1 was an awfully gray cloud. All that’s left, then, is to find a silver lining.
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