Insiders see the Thunder as the league’s avant-garde. Positions are fluid, sometimes changing over the course of a single possession; structured schemes and freewheeling improv happily coexist. Much of the team are still on their first, relatively cheap rookie contracts, and playing as distantly from celebrity’s gravitational centers as possible helps them focus. Wunderkind general manager Sam Presti has a vision for this team that sometimes recalls Donald Rumsfeld’s ill-fated “military of the future,” where the government would save billions by winning wars with nothing more than a handful of sleek, mechanized supersoldiers.

Yet for all the premature success, the symbolic weight, the irresistible ease with which they slip into this space that crazed NBA fans have long reserved for a team that’s both talented and revelatory, the Thunder are still kids—and as a unit, a work in progress.