Tuesday night, the Oklahoma City Thunder will kick off their title defense campaign in a primetime season-opening matchup against the Houston Rockets.
After winning the organization's first NBA Finals of the Sooner State era, Oklahoma City seems well-positioned to run things back in 2025-26, with the odds-makers already giving them the best chance to take home this year's Larry O'Brien Trophy.
Last season, this ball club proved that, even in the modern era of offense-driven play, defense still is the key to winning championships.
With this in mind, following recent remarks made by The Athletic's Sam Vecenie, even before game one officially comes underway, their odds of repeating should unquestionably be the best the league has to offer, as the draft guru went as far as to say that they have "the best defense I've seen since I've been covering basketball."
Thunder runaway favorites to once again have best defense in NBA
Vecenie would take his praise of this Thunder defense to an even higher level during this recent edition of The Game Theory Podcast by specifically calling them "the best defense since at least the Pistons of the 2004, Larry Brown era."
"The thing with Oklahoma City is that they come at you in so many ways... They're so disruptive, but, beyond that, they also get to be disruptive because they have the rim protection behind them to know that, 'Ok, if we get beat trying to be hyper aggressive at the point of attack, we have Sha rotating across the back-line as a free safety... We have Chet as an incredible rotational, anticipatory big man who's going to block shots, and we have Hartenstein there...'," Vecenie said. "They're the best defense of the last 20 years, essentially."
Based on how things played out last season, seeing Oklahoma City receive such hype shouldn't come as all that great of a shock.
After all, they did just lead the entire league in defensive rating (106.6), total deflections (1,751), opponent field goal percentage (43.6), opponent three-point percentage (34.2), opponent points in the paint (42.5), and opponent plus-minus (-12.9).
On top of this, among all players strewn across the NBA who saw 50 or more games of action, the Thunder rostered two of the top-three, four of the top five, five of the top nine, and eight of the top 20 players in defensive rating.
What's exciting is that all but one of these players (Dillon Jones) is returning for the forthcoming campaign.
Now, while even Vecenie has acknowledged in the past that this scrappy, defense-first approach the Thunder take to their game may not be the sexiest of sights for fans to see, it's obvious that this style helped lead the charge to their dominant 2025 title run.
As they prepare for this championship follow-up journey, it is widely believed that OKC will once again sport the most ferocious unit on the less glamorous side of the ball, which, in turn, should only aid in their pursuit of going back-to-back.