Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti met with the media for over two hours to conduct his exit interview on Monday. One of the topics discussed is the Thunder becoming the face of tanking and how some media critics labeled the team as the “black eye of the league.” The Thunder finished the season with a 24-58 record and the fourth-best lottery odds; the team received significant criticism over the last few weeks of the season due to the handling of rotation minutes and the amount of players who sat out games.
Presti fired back and said that those who say such things are nothing but media pundits who are not fully informed about the rebuilding process and how to win as a small-market team in the current landscape in the NBA. Which is a strong argument to make, the Thunder will never be a free agency destination, so the only way the team can return to contention is through drafting young players with the chance of developing into stars under team control for several seasons. Here’s Presti’s full answer to the question as the Thunder continue to face scrutiny in some parts of the media for their shameless tanking efforts:
“Well, the first thing I would say we have a rebuilding team now. Other people can — they like to name things because they have certain opinions that they are trying to — it’s performance art. That’s what social media has become is performance art. We’re not going to get caught up in that.
Not everybody should be a publisher at the end of the day. No offense, but — and that’s not directed to anybody in here specifically.
But I do think there’s a difference between being opinionated and being informed. I’d rather be informed than opinionated. The information is we’ve gone — we went 12 years and we put everything we had into that. Like everything. We taxed the team, no pun intended, to the point where, like, financially the third smallest market in the NBA shouldn’t be asked to go to that level in order to compete. I think that’s one of the prevailing issues that the league is going to have to solve for, especially with the level of new ownership that’s entered the equation and where the trending is financially in terms of just the disparity in the payrolls.
But yeah, we’re going to set our own pace. We’re not going to watch the clock, like I said earlier.
Rebuilding in the West, go look at history. Go study how many drafts it takes. Find your team, find the one that you think is successful and then work back from there. How many years does it take to get to one playoff appearance in the West? How many years does it take to get to two, back to back? That’s a lot different.
If you’re watching the clock all the time, you’re going to make it — you’re actually going to end up making it longer. Like I said, to try to fix things quickly takes a very long time. We’re entering our second draft.
In context, it’s like, I don’t even know what to say to that. Do you know what I mean? I understand the question, but for us we’re like, okay, we’re — that doesn’t change our point of view on what we’re trying to accomplish.”
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