The Okiahoma City Thunder are one win away from the 2025 NBA Finals. The Thunder won a Game 4 thriller, 128-126, over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Monday night to take a 3-1 lead in the Western Conference finals. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren all had big games for the top-seeded Thunder. SGA scored 40 points and just missed out on a triple-double with 10 assists and nine rebounds. Williams had 34 points and hit 6 of his 9 3-point attempts, while Holmgren scored 21 points and had three blocks.
The Wolves made a strong push in the second half and were led by their bench as Nickeil Alexander-Walker (23 points on 9-of-15 shooting) and Donte DiVincenzo (21 points, 5-of-8 3-point shooting) both had big nights. However, Minnesota's two leading scorers this postseason, Anthony Edwards and Julius Randle, both had subpar showings. Edwards ended with 16 points on 13 shots and took just two field goals in the first half. Randle was held to five points on 1-of-7 shooting.
Now the Thunder have the Timberwolves on the ropes. They're one game away from returning to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012, and they potentially have two more home games still ahead of them this round.
Below are three takeaways from the Thunder's Game 4 win.
1. Oklahoma City's stars showed up
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has been mostly excellent this postseason. Jalen Williams has been a mixed bag, especially against Denver. For the second straight postseason, Chet Holmgren's jumpers haven't really fallen. When the Thunder get two of them going, they usually win. When things have gone south, it's often been because only Gilgeous-Alexander was doing his part. But on Monday, the Thunder finally got all three of their young stars on the same page, and the result was their best game as a trio.
Combined, they scored 95 points in Game 4. Gilgeous-Alexander led the way with 40. Williams and Holmgren made eight of their 13 3-point attempts. Williams created enough offense to keep the Thunder afloat when Gilgeous-Alexander rested. Holmgren had several highlight dunks.
This was, ultimately, the concern for the Thunder coming into the playoffs. A big part of why they lost to Dallas last season was their inability to find a reliable secondary scorer. Williams and Holmgren are supposed to provide Gilgeous-Alexander with that offensive support. They didn't for most of the Denver series and were nearly eliminated as a result. But on Monday, the Thunder finally got the team effort they've been waiting all postseason for, and if this is what they can expect moving forward, the rest of the league is in serious trouble.
Minnesota's didn't
If this series ends as we expect it to in a Thunder victory, Minnesota is going to look back on this game as the turning point. The Timberwolves got the bench game to end all bench games. In total, their reserves scored 64 points. The starters scored just 62, but remember, 22 of them came from defensive specialist Jaden McDaniels. They lost this game because their best scorers didn't score.
Anthony Edwards scored 16 points. That made him Minnesota's fifth-leading scorer. He took only two shots in the first half. That was an explosion compared to Julius Randle, who scored only five points. Literally every other Timberwolves player who stepped on the floor scored more points than he did. It was the lowest-scoring game of his playoff career. The second-lowest scoring game of his playoff career was Game 2 of this series, in which he scored six points. The two combined for more turnovers (10) than made field goals (six).
Nobody's saying Edwards and Randle should be scoring at their standard level in this series. The Thunder have not only a historically great defense, but one ideally suited to punishing these two, specific stars. Oklahoma City packs the paint like no other defense in the NBA. That turns Edwards and Randle into jump-shooters. Lu Dort is perhaps the best perimeter defender in the NBA. The Thunder have a wide array of forwards and bigs to throw at Randle. This is a bad matchup for them. Slightly less efficient scoring was the expectation.
But with their season effectively on the line, Edwards and Randle took only 20 combined shots. Gilgeous-Alexander alone took 30. Whether that was a failure in execution or a failure in game-planning, it was an absolute failure. Minnesota's role players did everything they needed to do to win Game 4 and tie this series. Its stars did not, so the Timberwolves are down 3-1.
The Thunder learned from what went wrong last season
The first time a team goes through the playoff gauntlet is usually about self-evaluation. The Thunder learned several important things in last year's loss to Dallas. When it became apparent that Josh Giddey couldn't play in such a high-stakes matchup, he was shipped out for Alex Caruso. That trade has paid enormous dividends, but it was the other major weakness Dallas exposed that stood out so much in Game 4.
Dallas pulled in 16 more offensive rebounds than Oklahoma City in last year's series. The Thunder getting bludgeoned on the glass was part of the motivation for signing Isaiah Hartenstein. And lo and behold, in a game that might have won them the Western Conference, they pulled in 19 offensive rebounds and scored 24 second-chance points.
Now, Minnesota did plenty of work on the glass as well and actually scored more second-chance points in this game, but the whole point was that a year after getting killed on the boards, they managed to weaponize their own rebounding enough to survive their opponent's. They may not have made rebounding a strength, but they took what went wrong last year, addressed it, and are now one game away from the Finals.
