OKC Thunder: 3 top priorities for team this offseason
By Mark Nilon
This coming offseason is going to be a big one for the OKC Thunder.
After five straight seasons of making the playoffs, as well as 10 appearances throughout their 13-year existence, Oklahoma City’s front office opted to call it quits on contention and, ultimately, decided to embark on a full-fledged franchise rebuild.
Already ahead of the game in comparison to other tanking teams across the league’s landscape, as they have young stud Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in tow, Sam Presti and co. now embark on a mission this summer to try and continue building for a promising future.
For any NBA front office, the offseason is a time of restlessness, as they try to prepare their ball club for the upcoming campaign.
Presti, in specific, will be quite a busy man between now and the start of the 2021-22 season, as he finds himself heading towards a stacked schedule.
Though one could create a full-blown power ranking for the Thunder’s offseason priorities, we at TI believe it’s easier to just go about and list the 3 most pertinent:
OKC Thunder priority No. 1) Bring on more shot creators
To give credit where credit is due, Bleacher Report is the one that brought this priority to light, as they mentioned how no one in the rotation for the OKC Thunder managed to create 60 percent or more of their own looks since SGA went down for the season with plantar fasciitis in his right foot.
To improve upon this, writer, Dan Favale, went on to state that the front office should strongly consider looking into adding scorers who can buy their own buckets this summer, be it through the free agency market with their possible cap space being north of $55 million or by means of the upcoming draft.
We took things a step further and went about pinpointing a few players, in specific, that they should consider pursuing to fill such a need, but there are many other options Sam Presti and co. could target should they so choose.
Though it may be the vaguest priority you’ll see mentioned today, our list starts out with the team’s need to add on shot creators prior to next year’s campaign.