Coming into the 2019-20 season, OKC Thunder fans didn’t know exactly what to expect from the year. Paul George, the player the team had surprisingly just signed to a new contract the previous summer in free agency, had privately requested a trade to team up with Kawhi Leonard on the LA Clippers.
Russell Westbrook was traded to the Houston Rockets, and just like that the team looked vastly different than it did at the end of the year before. It wasn’t inconceivable that the team might trade Chris Paul (return in the Westbrook deal) and Steven Adams while they could, continuing to pile assets in order to build moving forward.