Evidence shows NBA is clearly catering to Mavs & many others over Thunder in 2024-25

A rather popular and polarizing conspiracy among fans is that the NBA caters to big-market teams in the league with kid gloves, while the smaller, less tabloid-catching clubs are treated as mere afterthoughts when it comes to many of the decisions made by higher-ups.

The OKC Thunder clearly fall into this latter camp, and, while we're not claiming to abide by the aforementioned ideology, if we hypothetically already did then looking at how the league's regular season schedule panned out would only strengthen this belief system.

Despite being fresh off a 57-win campaign, a top-seeded finish in the Western Conference standings, and boasting a roster spearheaded by last year's runner-up for and this season's frontrunner to win the MVP award in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Oklahoma City is by no means being rewarded.

OKC Thunder tied for most back-to-backs during 2024-25 NBA Season

Instead, the Thunder find themselves coming into their 2024-25 follow-up campaign slated to take part in 16 back-to-back bouts during their 82-game stretch, which is tied with 10 other teams for the most in the entire league.

If this metric wasn't already bad enough, legitimate threats to their hopes of claiming the NBA crown this season in the reigning champion Boston Celtics and recently heated-up conference rival, the Dallas Mavericks (both big market teams, mind you) are tied for the fewest two-straight stretches with 13 a piece.

However, what makes matters even worse is that two of the three revenge games the Thunder will see against Luka Doncic and co. will be on the second night of these dreaded back-to-backs, while 10 in total will see latter contests against actual top-tier conference threats such as the LA Clippers, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Memphis Grizzlies.

Considering the margin for error seems to be quite small out in the always competitive west standings heading into the new year, this is quite an undesirable turn of events for OKC, especially when fully realizing that teams are generally rather sluggish on the back end of consecutive nights of seeing action.

And while fans may wish to hold out hope and bank on the fact that the Thunder can easily overcome such hardships because of the fact that they've managed to improve so much this offseason, it must be remembered that while this may be true, so, too, has the rest of the conference.