Almost two decades after the Thunder moved to Oklahoma City, they stand one win away from completing their meteoric rise and winning their first NBA championship with Sunday’s game seven home match-up looming against the Indiana Pacers.
Win or lose, this year has been the most successful season in franchise history, with Oklahoma City Mayor and GW alum David Holt among the fans reveling in the team’s fortunes. Holt, a former Hatchet sports editor during the 1999-2000 academic year who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from GW in 2001, said the Thunder’s domination this season magnified his city’s global brand and brought variegated Oklahomans together.
The Thunder’s finals run comes 17 years after the team became Oklahoma City’s first major professional sports franchise, a move that triggered an economic and cultural transformation, and days after city officials extended the team’s lease through 2053, fully entrenching it as a local staple.
“Making it to the finals, and certainly winning the finals, would be a big boost to us for years to come in lots of ways that have nothing to do with basketball,” Holt said. “Because it is so meaningful to our city, being the size that we are — 42nd largest market. We need these opportunities to lift the brand on the national and international level.”
Holt said the Thunder’s success this season has brought fans and reporters from around the world to Oklahoma City — adding that he’s done interviews with journalists from Italy, Norway, Canada and the United Kingdom — exemplifying the life the team has pumped into the city since Oklahoma City-based investors purchased the then-Seattle SuperSonics for $350 million and relocated it in 2008. He said Americans and people globally are “obsessed” with sports, prompting them to invest in or visit cities, like Oklahoma City, that they may not have heard of otherwise.
Holt said in a 2023 release that the Thunder has brought in an additional $600 million in revenue and 3,000 jobs to Oklahoma City each year. Since the Thunder’s arrival in 2008, the city’s GDP has risen by 62 percent and Oklahoma City has grown from the nation’s 31st-largest to its 20th-largest city, according to the release.
“For us as a city, getting a team initially was a huge deal in terms of our identity and our brand,” Holt said. “And we have seen a totally different city emerge over the last 17 years on every front.”
Holt, the Thunder’s “fan-in-chief” who’s served as mayor since 2018, said he’s honed the city’s development around sports, marked by rallying city voters in December 2023 to overwhelmingly approve a six-year 1 percent sales tax to fund a new $900 million arena that prompted the Thunder to opt to stay in Oklahoma City for another generation, a deal inked on Tuesday. He also said he’s spent the last seven years recruiting two sports, canoe slalom and softball, that will be part of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, to compete in Oklahoma City, the only place outside of Southern California to host Olympic events, to leverage the games to further build up his city.
But Holt said his passion for sports only began after he arrived in Foggy Bottom as a college student in 1997. Despite having no interest in watching sports growing up — he said he didn’t watch the Super Bowl until his junior year of high school — he was drawn to The Hatchet’s sport section during his freshman year and the opportunities to cover a nationally-recognized men’s basketball program, which had just come off three trips to March Madness in the four years prior.
“Sports has ended up being a big part of the way we’ve built our city, and a big part of my tenure as mayor,” Holt said. “And yeah, you could certainly trace a lot of it back to being a political science major who writes sports articles for The GW Hatchet.”
In his time at The Hatchet, he covered trips to the NCAA tournament for both the men’s and women’s basketball teams, dabbled in column writing as men’s basketball began to struggle entering the 2000s and waxed poetics about the team’s standing compared to other DMV teams, a strong advocate for GW-Georgetown matchups — even after his graduation.
Moving to D.C. after growing up in Oklahoma City helped him realize how crucial professional sports were to a person’s and a city’s identity, Holt said. He said he began to notice when he met people from other parts of the country for the first time that their go-to small talk would be asking about hometown professional sports teams, which stuck with him as he eventually became involved in Oklahoma City’s quest to become a professional sports city.
Holt, a Republican, was first elected as Oklahoma City’s 38th mayor in 2018 with 78.5 percent of votes and was reelected in 2022 with 59.8 percent of votes. He is the city’s first Native American mayor and has worked across the political aisle, building a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents in his campaigns.
He also coined the phrase “One OKC,” aimed at putting aside division to find a common ground — a point he said the Thunder has worked to reinforce by unifying the city’s residents, who voted nearly 50-50 in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, around supporting the team.
“They help remind people of their basic shared humanity and that, if you can cheer for the same sports team, maybe there’s other things you can have in common as well,” Holt said.
The Thunder also united the city’s divided sports fans, Holt said. He said Oklahoma City has always been “in love with” sports, but before 2008 was focused on the collegiate market and split between those rooting for The University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.
“There was never a team that we could all unify around, and the Thunder changed that,” Holt said. “Regardless of your collegiate loyalties, regardless of where you live in the city, regardless of your ethnic or religious background, regardless of your socioeconomic status, everybody supports the Thunder.”
Holt said he never misses a home game — especially not a playoff home game — and frequently hosts watch parties for away games where he can be seen leading a crowd in chants of “O-K-C.” His social media accounts are flooded with images of Thunder games, players and merchandise.
Holt said his favorite moments this season were when the Thunder clinched game-four victories over the Denver Nuggets and the Indiana Pacers, critical wins that propelled Oklahoma City’s team to have the chance to secure the league’s most sought-after title: NBA champions.
“The city, and really the nation, have talked so much about how far Oklahoma City has come as a city, but the catalyst for that conversation has been obviously, how far we have come as a basketball team,” Holt said. “As a mayor who loves the Thunder and has been there kind of since the ground floor of this whole enterprise, it’s been an amazing summer.”
As for how game seven will go, Holt said on Wednesday, when the Thunder led the Pacers 3-2, that they “got it.”
“But even if we have to go to seven, I mean, we have the strongest home court advantage in professional sports, really,” Holt said. “So I feel good that we’ll be able to do it if it comes to that.
