OKC

Oklahoma City Thunder, American professional basketball team based in Oklahoma City that plays in the Western Conference of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The franchise was based in Seattle for the first 41 years of its existence, during which, as the Seattle SuperSonics, it won three conference titles (1978, 1979, 1996) and the 1979 NBA championship. The Thunder won the Western Conference title in 2012. Twenty-two games into the 1977–78 season, Wilkens returned to Seattle to serve as the team’s head coach. He turned around a Sonics team that was 5–17 at the time of his hire and led them to a fourth-place conference finish. In the postseason the Sonics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, the Portland Trail Blazers, and the Denver Nuggets en route to the NBA finals, where they lost to the Washington Bullets in seven games

The SuperSonics (named for Seattle’s aerospace industry and usually shortened to “the Sonics”) began play as an NBA expansion team in 1967 and were the first major North American sports franchise based in the Pacific Northwest. Early teams were notable for featuring player-coach Lenny Wilkens, guard Fred (“Downtown Freddie”) Brown, and all-star centre-forward Spencer Haywood, who joined the Sonics in 1971 after winning a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed him to become the first player to join the league before he was four years out of high school. The Sonics did not qualify for the playoffs until the 1974–75 season, when the team, under the guidance of second-year head coach Bill Russell, earned a postseason berth by finishing 43–39 and defeated the Detroit Pistons in a three-game first-round playoff series.

George Karl became Seattle’s head coach midway through the 1991–92 season, taking over a high-flying team that starred point guard Gary Payton and power forward Shawn Kemp. In Karl’s first full season at the helm (1992–93), the SuperSonics advanced to a Western Conference finals showdown with the Phoenix Suns, a close seven-game contest that the Suns ultimately won. The following season saw the Sonics register the best record in the NBA during the regular season only to become the first top-seeded team in league history to lose in the first round of the playoffs to an eighth-seeded team (the Denver Nuggets). In 1995–96 the Sonics posted a 64–18 record, the best in the Western Conference that year and at the time the 10th best in NBA history. In the postseason the SuperSonics won their first three playoff series to earn a berth in the NBA finals, where they met Michael Jordan and the dominant Chicago Bulls (owners of the best record in NBA history [72–10] that season), who defeated Seattle in a six-game series.