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On the night the Oklahoma City Thunder won the NBA championship, John McNamara’s phone pinged. A familiar number showed up. Sam Presti, who captained the Concord-Carlisle High School basketball team under then-coach McNamara, and who is now the Thunder’s executive vice president and general manager, was texting to say thanks. “He reached out and said he was grateful for the role I played in his life,” McNamara said of Presti. “He has a lot of integrity. [He] lets others share in his success.”
A 1995 graduate of CCHS, Presti said he “never would have been” who he is today without his Concord influences. “I’m a product of all those people who have helped me along the way,” Presti told The Concord Bridge in a phone conversation. “I knew long before how fortunate I was to have this many relationships and such a great community to grow up [in].”
Presti, who held his postseason press conference Monday morning, was asked to reflect on his relationship with Bennett. “I think Clay is true to himself,” Presti said. “He has so much respect for our players. I think that’s the big one … I think he has tremendous appreciation for their families, and he wants people to have a great experience in Oklahoma and playing for the team. You can see that in just the way the former players embrace him. “I also think the relationships are not transactional, and I think that makes a big difference with everybody in the way in which he supports all of us and the resources that are required to have a team in Oklahoma City compete on an elite level.”
Kendrick Perkins: Appreciate the love Presti and love for life @okcthunder
Sam Presti: We have people from Canada, Serbia, the West Coast, the East Coast, middle America, France, Australia, that all come together for a collective goal. There's compassion on the team. There's a cowboy toughness, a self-reliance that comes from being homegrown, and an essential sense of goodness. If that sounds familiar, that's because those are the same things that have been in Oklahoma for generations. I think the thing to recognize is that the team is really just a reflection of the state. I think the team itself resonates with the people here because it really is them looking at what makes living here special and unique.
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Sam Presti: It's a magnetic relationship. I've heard people say that this is a team of underdogs in an underdog state, and I do agree with the first half of that, which is that we do have some underdogs on this team. People who have been doubted, questioned, guys that have come to the NBA through very unorthodox roots and paths, and that's what makes the team unique and special. But I don't agree with the fact that this is an underdog state in any way. I think the thing to note here, in my opinion, is that there's really nothing missing in Oklahoma. There's nothing missing here. We didn't need a trophy to validate anything whatsoever.
Kevin Durant says Thunder weren't 'ready' after team's 2012 Finals run: They weren't ready for us to be yearly contenders
Durant sat down with NBA luminaries LeBron James and Steve Nash for an interview on the "Mind the Game" podcast, which released Part 1 of the two-part chat on Tuesday morning. Durant said he believes the Thunder's front office wasn't "ready," after the team's run to the 2012 Finals, which came before the now-unfortunate trade of James Harden (benefiting the Rockets). Durant didn't look back on the Thunder's Finals loss and the Harden trade with frustration. Instead, he still regrets a missed opportunity that set back a team that was on the rise. "We sped up the timeline. All of us. Each individual player, Serge [Ibaka], you didn't know, he came out of nowhere. He came out here being the best shot blocker in the league," Durant said. "I'm averaging 30 at 21 years old. Russell [Westbrook] was 22 years old as an All-Star, James [Harden] Sixth Man at 22, so we exceeded the timeline, so they wasn't ready for that. That's just my theory. I don't know exactly what Sam [Presti] was thinking or the owner, but my theory is that I don't think they were ready exactly for us to be contenders every year."
"Since we reached the finals, you're supposed to upgrade and fine-tune and make changes around," Durant said. "You can't just pull one of the key figures off the team and expect us to continue what we was doing. So I think they were kind of shocked at how fast, how good we got so fast and sometimes you get confused. On top of that, Sam Presti was probably what, 30-something years old? He was young. Everybody was young, trying to figure stuff out, trying to understand what this landscape was."
For any concerns about that, Presti shut them down. In his 2024-25 end-of-season press conference. The OKC GM said he doesn't view his job with such black-and-white lenses. There are shades of gray involved. To show that, the Thunder hosted predraft workouts the morning of their Game 7 win over the Indiana Pacers in the 2025 NBA Finals. "It's just not where my mind goes. For me, the fact that we accomplished something as a group of people, to me that is an incredible accomplishment, but I've never looked at that as a signal of any kind," Presti said. "It's easy to say that now, but those of you that have been around me for 17 years, I think you probably know, I'm always focused on the quality of the work."
"I have a lot of respect for the role of luck and chance and how that plays such a huge factor in all of our lives, professionally and personally," Presti said. "We were fortunate in a lot of ways this year. So I wouldn't look at it as like this is some threshold personally, and I'm not trying to diminish what it means for the city and for the team and for the organization and everybody involved. But for me personally, it's just being in it with everybody and consistently trying to make good decisions."
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Sam Presti on loads and injuries: To think there's no correlation it's almost insulting, game is totally different from 10 years ago
Sam, any thoughts on Achilles injuries across the league? Sam Presti: Yeah, I mean I just think the there's certainly something to be learned from the injuries. Um I think it's a couple years in a row now that we've been in the postseason and the best players on certain teams aren't playing for, you know. I think the one thing we have to do is get away from a the defensive nature of trying to convince people, players, and teams that there's no connection between the loads and the injuries. We're kind of bordering on a level it's almost insulting, you know. It doesn't mean it's anyone's fault. It doesn't mean we don't want our best players playing every single night. It's not a matter of players not wanting to play or being soft or anything like that. But I don't think we should be putting our head in the sand and acting as if there's no correlation. The reason why is because if we're pointing to data, the data is from 20 years ago or 10 years ago. The game is totally different sport than it was even several years ago because of the amount of possessions, the way the offenses work now.
Sam Presti: It's not people standing around the three-point line, you know, waiting for double teams and then the ball to get kicked out. There's so much movement on every possession. they're we're playing almost like two games compared to 10 years ago and how involved the bodies are. Then you take into consideration the fact that everyone's trying to play as much as possible because of the 65 game rule. Then you take into consideration that the back half of the schedule is more condensed than it has been in the last 10 years because the In-Season tournament cannot have back-to-back games on those days. So you got much less flexibility in the schedule, a game that's like really redlinining compared to past seasons uh in terms of the the overall movement and torque on your body, the uptick in physicality, right, that we have because that's where we want the game to go and it's a and it's a good thing. That's a good thing. But then you go right into the postseason and those games are even more physical. So it's not a guys don't want to play thing. It's a I think it's more we want the guys to be able to play thing and putting our heads together and be rational about it and not defensive trying to produce numbers and data that indicates that the more you play the more healthy you are. It's probably somewhere probably somewhere in between and um I think we have to have respect for the players on that to try to try to understand what's going on with it.
Brandon Rahbar: Sam Presti on whether he knew this OKC defense would be so good: "You never know anything. You really don't. It's so easy once you have something like this happen to build this beautiful mosaic or narrative." Presti says he writes everything down and so he knows all the indecision and unassuredness he's had in so many things. Things like: "Good thing we didn't take this guy that I really wanted and took this guy instead because it really worked out."
Brandon Rahbar: Sam Presti on Ousmane Dieng: "He had some great moments for us this year in real rotation minutes. Minutes he could not have provided the year before. He was one of the youngest players in that draft class. We knew this was going to take some time.. He was contributing to winning. He's on the right track. His biggest change is his body. He's really changed his body."
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