The NBA's two best teams last season are on completely divergent paths

The Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers met a few months ago for the NBA Finals. Now one team is off to a league-best record, while waves of injuries have sent the other to a dismal start.

For 17 days last June, all that separated Oklahoma City and Indiana over seven games of the NBA Finals was 19 points and a ruptured Achilles tendon.

Five months later, as the title celebration rolls on for the Thunder and the Pacers endure the painful aftereffects of star guard Tyrese Haliburton’s devastating injury, those same teams have begun strikingly divergent seasons — separated by the largest gap in the entire NBA, by record.

Even without all-NBA wing Jalen Williams, Oklahoma City’s second-best player who is recovering from offseason surgery to repair a wrist and has yet to make his season debut, the Thunder have started 14-1. Since 2000, only six other teams had a record as good or better through a season’s first 15 games.

What might be scariest about Oklahoma City is its apparent lack of complacency coming off last season’s championship.

“Honestly speaking, I didn’t like the way we won, if that makes sense,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder guard who earned most valuable player honors during the regular season and Finals, told The Athletic this month. “I didn’t think we won an NBA championship playing our best basketball. That was the first time we’d been that far in the playoffs, so it was a learning experience for us.”