Thunder offseason primer: The ultimate buyers in a buyer’s market

As well as a legitimate superstar in Shai, an enviable collection of young prospects such as Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams, and a famously enormous cache of draft capital collated from every other team, the Thunder have plenty of money to spend. Only Gilgeous-Alexander ($35,859,950) and Luguentz Dort ($16,500,000) are set to earn a salary above the mid-level exception next season, and the Thunder achieve a lot of cost control via the rookie scale contracts afforded to Holmgren ($10,880,640), Williams ($4,775,760), Josh Giddey ($8,352,367), Ousmane Dieng ($5,027,040) and Cason Wallace ($5,555,920).

Furthermore, there are no bad contracts. The only overhang from all the unwanted contracts of other teams acquired via trade will be a single $1,000,000 cap hit owed to Kevin Porter Jr; beyond that, the dead salary of Rudy Gay, Aleksej Pokusevski, Usman Garuba and TyTy Washington all expire this summer.

All told, the Thunder are in an almost-unique position of having both an All-Star short of his prime years, and near-maximum cap space to be able to target another. In what figures to be a slowed market due to the loading up of salaries around the league over the past couple of seasons, the Thunder are in the driving seat of all driving seats.