Here’s Oklahoma City Thunder GM Sam Presti on the cumulative effect of dealing with injuries/different starting lineups during 2025-26.
(via Oklahoma City Thunder):
“I think in the past, we’ve always had that injuries are part of the sport. And I think in every time we’ve had something like that happen, we’ve seen some silver lining in that, like individual development, people stepping in, changing, trying new things. And I think that happened again this year to a large extent. We had a lot of big growth in individuals. I do think the one thing, if there’s one thing I’m a little frustrated about besides not winning the final quarter of the season, is I think we lost out on a lot of team development. Just the amount of [continuity] when we play 31 different starting lineups, the lack of continuity with our main guys. Just there’s some team things coming out of we learn from every series we’re in. So coming out of the Indiana series, I think there were some things we felt really good about trying to improve upon and get better at. But you need the regular season to do that.
“And at some level, we could never get to those things because it felt like we get one guy back, we lose two guys. We get two guys back. So the rotation, the nine or ten guys we’re playing in the playoffs last year, I think they played together [and] we had them available for seven or eight games this year. So at some point, it kinda tips a little bit. It’s not an excuse because we could still have gotten to the Finals. Obviously, we pushed ourselves to get to that point and I’m really proud of that. But in terms of what we lost out on, I think the team development component of things that we had a pretty good handle on what we wanted to attack. It’s just hard to do that without some of the key cogs out there on a regular basis.”
