OKC Thunder Trivia: uncovering 50 fun, surprising and random facts

The franchise existed before OKC.

Before becoming the Oklahoma City Thunder, they were the Seattle SuperSonics. Founded in 1967, the team played 41 seasons in Seattle, won the Western Conference championships three times, and took home an NBA title in 1979.

In 2006, former Strarbucks CEO Howard Schultz sold the team—and its WNBA franchise—to a group of Oklahoma City investors. Two years later, Chesapeake Energy Arena began hosting the newly rebranded OKC Thunder. In a resulting lawsuit by the city of Seattle, it was decided that the SuperSonics name, logo, and colors would remain in Seattle for use should a future NBA franchise start there.

When the team moved to Oklahoma there was already a strong core of talent. Kevin Durant, Jeff Green and Nick Collison are the players most recall. However, there were six other players who played on the last Sonics team and on the first Thunder team. Those six were Johan Petro, Mouhamed Sene, Robert Swift, Earl Watson (yes the same player who turned coach), Chris Wilcox and Damien Wilkins.

As for the SuperSonics they have a long storied history with a number of stars who’ve peppered the history books with records. The most well known are Gary Payton, Sean Kemp, Jack Sikma, Fred Brown, Gus Williams and Nate McMillan. Every time there is talk of league expansion (and as much as I appreciate the OKC Thunder having a team) I cross my fingers the first city to land a franchise is Seattle.