Patreon Peek: Terrible and Awesome

Here’s a peek at the latest “Weekend Edition” newsletter, which we send our supporters on Patreon every week. Patrons receive weekly perks including the newsletter and editorial note that follows, early post releases, podcast bonuses, free and discounted merch, local business specials, and more, all chased with the satisfactions of materially supporting quality Thunder content that isn’t awash in clickbait and ads to generate revenue. This week, you can view the full Weekend Edition for free here.

A note from the editor:

This newsletter is entirely too long.

I’m not known for my brevity, but this marks the first email I’ve written with a “continued” section. If you slept through any hour of the last week, you may have missed a Thunder transaction. We barely kept up ourselves. Let this newsletter, sprawling with enough articles and links and multimedia to last a couple months on other sites, serve as a symbolic reminder of just how much the Thunder have done over a short period of time. Sure, we have helpful roundups of all the deals and the resultant roster changes in their considerable wake. But for every single one of these items–a draft pick, a trade, a declined or exercised option–there or more hours of negotiation and deliberation from the front office, more drafts and redrafts of more pages of paperwork, and more consternation about what the proverbial “readers” in Thunder nation will think, than goes into a real humdinger of a Weekend Edition.

We knew this was coming, but the swiftness of the execution was something to behold. Daily Thunder will be helping you digest and adapt to the heartbreak and excitement that comes with such a dramatic end/beginning. But for now, I think the massiveness of the overhaul should be appreciated. You might find the Grand Canyon overrated as an inspirational sight, but you can’t argue with its scale. The same is true of the repositioning, replenishment, and rebuilding that has occurred over the last seven days: you may not be in love with the crater before you, but you can’t deny how massive a job it was to accomplish. That there were no divergences from the clear plan and vision of VP & GM Sam Presti, nor any agreements bungled, no players accidentally not-traded, when dealing with approximately half of the league’s teams, a third of its players, and 75% of its draft shares (I may be exaggerating a hair), is a sign of utter competence and total commitment for an accomplishment that other franchises just could not match.

Oklahoma City’s week was a terrible, awesome sight to behold.

– Cray Allred