If you think the Oklahoma City Thunder are unlike any team you've ever seen, you're right in one very important way.
On Thursday, in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals, the Thunder have a chance to get the win they need to knock the defending champion Golden State Warriors out of the playoffs and advance to the NBA Finals.
If that happens Thursday (or in Game 6 or Game 7), it will all start to seem obvious in retrospect. Of course the Thunder's size, athleticism and star power were too much for the Warriors, especially with Stephen Curry hobbled after the sprained MCL he suffered earlier in the postseason.
Don't believe it. Nothing has been inevitable about this Thunder run. Instead, Oklahoma City is on the verge of accomplishing something without precedent in NBA history: the greatest back-to-back upsets the league has ever seen.
Thunder's run already historic
To be technical, Oklahoma City's playoff run is already unprecedented. When the Thunder beat the San Antonio Spurs 4-2 in the Western Conference semifinals, it was the first time a team with a point differential greater than plus-10 points per game had lost to a team with a worse point differential.
Previously, seven of the eight NBA teams with double-digit margins of victory had won the championship, including Golden State the previous season. The lone exception was the 1971-72 Milwaukee Bucks (plus-11.2), who lost to an L.A. Lakers team that posted the best point differential in NBA history (plus-12.8). That season was the only time before 2015-16 that multiple teams had been plus-10 or better in the same season.
Merely by facing two teams with differentials so strong, Oklahoma City made history. Beating both of them would be unthinkable.
Best pairs of opponents beaten
The 1971-72 Lakers hold the distinction of beating the best pair of opponents in the playoffs, as measured by point differential. Because the league was so top-heavy that season (following expansion and the emergence of the rival ABA) and so West-heavy, the Lakers had to beat a Chicago Bulls team with a plus-8.3 margin of victory in the conference semifinals before knocking off the defending champion Bucks just to reach the Finals.
That's a combined plus-19.5 differential. No other team in NBA history has beaten teams with a combined differential of better than plus-16.5 in the same postseason, and just four other teams have knocked off two opponents who combined to outscore opponents by at least 15 points per game during the regular season.
By comparison, if the Thunder take down the Warriors, they'll have beaten teams with a combined plus-21.4 differential, surpassing the 1971-72 Lakers and blowing away the rest of the field.
More history potentially on tap
Of course, there's one big difference between the 1971-72 Lakers and Oklahoma City this year: The Lakers were favored in those series by virtue of their own historic point differential and home-court advantage throughout the playoffs.
The Thunder have been lower-seeded underdogs in both series, as were the other four teams on the list. But two of the other three teams that pulled a pair of upsets before the Finals subsequently lost: the 2009 Magic in the Finals and the 2013 Grizzlies in the Western Conference finals.
That leaves the 1995 Rockets -- the lowest-seeded champion in NBA history -- as one of two teams since the playoffs expanded to 16 teams to win three series on the road in the same postseason, something Oklahoma City will attempt if the team reaches the Finals. (Whichever team wins the East, either the Cleveland Cavaliers or Toronto Raptors, would have home-court advantage against the Thunder.)
The Rockets won all four series as the lower seed, having come into the playoffs as the sixth seed. The eighth-seeded 1999 New York Knicks also won three series as the road team before losing to the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals.
Before Oklahoma City can attempt to duplicate that feat and make some more history, there's the small matter of closing out Golden State, which hadn't lost consecutive games this season before Games 3 and 4 of this series. As likely as a Thunder victory might look now, a Warriors win in Thursday's Game 5 in the Bay would put the pressure back on Oklahoma City to finish the series at home and avoid a deciding Game 7 on the road.
Still, the Thunder's performance the past three weeks against the best competition the NBA has to offer has been historic, and their run has a chance to become even more improbable if Oklahoma City can get one more win.