Sam Presti addresses the possibility of making win-now moves

“You can’t buy the paint for your house that you haven’t bought yet.”

The Oklahoma City Thunder continue to be a fixture when it comes to discussions of potential landing spots for future disgruntled superstars.

Due to a mix of their young talent and rich collection of draft assets, the Thunder will likely be linked as a trade partner for stars among national NBA pundits. The rise of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as one of the best players in the league only strengthens that cause.

When asked about being a popular choice for win-now moves candidates, Thunder general manager Sam Presti didn’t completely rule out the possibility of making that type of trade in the future, but it sounds as if they’re prioritizing seeing their young core prosper and hope to keep them together for the long term.

“I have thought about this question and a way to kind of put it into terms that isn’t dismissive because there’s no script here. I don’t want to give you the sense — we practice what we preach. We are open minded, clearly. But there’s a couple reasons why I think that particular topic is maybe not relevant right now.

One, I used the example with the paint last year. You can’t buy the paint for your house that you haven’t bought yet, that you haven’t actually bought. You don’t know where the house is. You don’t know where it’s situated. You don’t know what style it is. You don’t know how much paint you’ll need.

We don’t really know what we have right now, so to even say — this is very broad, but a star. Where? Who’s to say we don’t have a player that could be really good in that spot already? We don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know.

We may not. But chances are — it’s really hard to find those players. We have one of them. If there happens to be one or two or more on the roster, then we’re like, we’ve really gotten fortunate. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is, again, I’m not trying to dismiss everyone’s excitement, but we’re not a .500 team. Like I said earlier, we have to finish our breakfast before we start acting like we’re on the cusp of something.

I think this is, again, part of the headwinds that you face as a young team. I wouldn’t want to “cash in” to become average or above average. I don’t think that’s really what anyone is expecting. When people say go all in, I don’t think they’re saying go all in to have one season that’s slightly better than your last season.

I think when the team is performing at an extremely high level, you then know, wait, something could help us, and you have better information, we can be accurate. We’re big on accuracy.

Then the other thing I say, and I think this is really important, is we can’t let the fact that we have some additional draft capital make us soft. You don’t want to lose your industriousness. We can’t cut corners here. It doesn’t matter if we do this or we do that because we have these tools that are just going to solve everything.

I don’t know how many times people have gone — I’m not sure exactly the nomenclature of all-in or cash your chips in. I don’t know what that means. When I think about that, I think about a gambling scenario, which again, doesn’t jive with sustainable success. It jives with like gambling, live-or-die, lose the house, go home and explain it to your significant other.

I don’t want us to rely on that like it’s some type of panacea, because one, I don’t know how often it’s actually worked that someone has done that; and then two, we might need those tools to have a functional payroll over time if our players turn out to be as good as some people are projecting.

Now, I can’t protect that. I don’t know. But those tools are relatively important to some of the more high-performing teams in the league right now that have big payrolls.

I understand it’s a bit of a — again, these types of questions — there’s a performative — to do that would be almost performative. I don’t think you can make a rational case for it now.

But perhaps at some point when we have a little more information, the team has demonstrated its capability and played in high-performing games and we see what our limitations are, potentially, but I don’t know that there’s a lot of good rational thinking behind that other than impulse and following content creation that is just part of the world that we live in.”

This was one of Presti’s better answers during his 2023-24 preseason media conference. Instead of making a blockbuster trade for the sake of it, it sounds like the Thunder will take a methodological approach that looks at the long-term view of the franchise.

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