Charles Barkley has spent two decades sniffing at front offices that draft over needs, hand out long contracts to past-prime stars, and confuse depth with hoarding. On Saturday night, after Oklahoma City's 131-108 demolition of the Los Angeles Lakers gave the Thunder a 3-0 second-round lead, Barkley did something he almost never does on Inside the NBA. He named a winner.
"You call them the others — you know what I call them? Stars in waiting," Barkley said. "They have guys that are just waiting to be Sam Presti. They must have the best scouting staff in the damn world. Sam Presti has taken over as the best GM."
It was a striking shift. For years, Barkley's preferred trophy for top executive belonged to Pat Riley in Miami or Masai Ujiri, then in Toronto. The Thunder, in Barkley's telling, are the rare modern team where the depth chart is the achievement, not the star.
The statistical case helped. Seven Thunder players reached double figures in Game 3. Reserve guard Ajay Mitchell, in his second NBA season, scored 24 off the bench and took over the fourth quarter. Chet Holmgren posted 18 and nine. Cason Wallace, Isaiah Joe and Aaron Wiggins all carried scoring runs in the four games of the series so far. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, in his second straight season as the league's MVP frontrunner, has not had what Barkley called "an SGA game" in this series and Oklahoma City has won by an average of more than 18 points per outing anyway.
"Hey, so Chet Holmgren had 18 and nine in that game," host Ernie Johnson noted. Holmgren, joining the broadcast from Los Angeles after the win, betrayed a quiet flex of his own.
"All 17 dudes come in and get their work in," Holmgren said. "It clearly shows out there with how good all these dudes are."
Barkley, picking up on the line, made the count central to his GM-of-the-year argument. "He says no, we got 17 players," Barkley repeated. "That's a big number, because normally it's 12 players on a team. This guy said, we got 17 players. That's a nice little flex."
Kenny Smith joined in on the architecture story rather than the basketball one. "They don't play well only because Shai is there or not there or Jaylen is there," Smith said. "They play well regardless. Cuz they just like — I just love the way they share the ball. It turned down a good shot for a great shot."
The deeper Barkley dug, the more uncomfortable he got with where Presti's draft pipeline was about to flow. The Thunder, by virtue of long-running asset hoarding, also enter Tuesday's NBA draft lottery with picks they could use to add another rotation piece to the league's deepest roster.
"Did they get a top-four pick tomorrow?" Barkley asked rhetorically. "Let me tell you something. I'm praying they win the lottery to stop the tanking. That would be karma. For OKC to win the lottery after all the tanking that went on. Wouldn't that be karma?"
It would, in fact, be a different kind of karma than the one Barkley referenced. The Thunder built this roster by trading Russell Westbrook and Paul George into a haul of draft picks and stripping the team to the studs, a process that produced a 22-win season, the second-overall selection that became Holmgren, and the No. 1 pick that became the foundation of their second unit. Presti's bet was that culture, scouting and patience would convert assets into starters faster than other front offices could spend money. Six years later, with a reigning champion and a 3-0 lead in the second round, the math has resolved.
"It's hard to pick just one," Holmgren said when asked which of the Thunder's stars-in-waiting was next. "It just kind of depends on whose number is called that night."
For the Lakers on Monday in Game 4, the answer to that question is increasingly the only one that matters.
