Analyzing Oklahoma City's Toughest Stretch in 2023-24

The Thunder face a stellar lineup of teams before the holiday season, and should give fans a good idea of the team's direction.

Oklahoma City enters this season with expectations after surprising the entire league a season ago.

It’s certainly a big year for the Thunder regarding its full circle rebuild process. Oklahoma City is inching back toward relevancy and contention, and the team has an opportunity to take a big step forward this season.

The problem is, the West is loaded. Teams near the top are star-studded, and everyone understands Oklahoma City is no snoozer anymore. In recent years, the Thunder’s style of play and hustle on the floor allowed the young core to sneak up on other teams. It’ll be much more difficult for Mark Daigneault’s team to catch anyone off guard this year after what they were able to accomplish a season ago and the overall direction of the franchise. The Thunder will have to take advantage of every winnable game on the schedule, especially considering the tough stretch of games during the holiday season.

The NBA released an article detailing one key fact about each team’s schedule, and listed under Oklahoma City was the stretch of top-tier teams near the end of December.

“From Dec. 14 through Jan. 2, the Thunder will play 10 straight games against teams that had winning records last season,” John Schuhmann wrote. “That’s tied (with a Houston stretch from Nov. 4-24) for the longest streak of games against ’22-23 winners, and it includes two games (Dec. 16 and Dec. 29) in Denver.”

Aside from the two games against Denver, the Thunder will square off against Memphis, both Los Angeles teams, Sacramento, Minnesota and Boston during that stretch. Because the West is so deep, matchups against the Kings and the Timberwolves could really matter down the stretch when tiebreakers come into play.

Coming out of the tough slew of games on January 2, Thunder fans should have a solid idea of where this team stands in terms of competing in the West. Of course, Oklahoma City could embark on a late-season run, but we’ll be able to see how the team fairs against the league’s best before the All-Star break.

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