{"id":197,"date":"2026-08-06T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/thunder-clinch-top-seed-west\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T18:26:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T18:26:43","slug":"thunder-clinch-top-seed-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/thunder-clinch-top-seed-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder clinch the top seed with a week to spare"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 65-win pace, the youngest core in the bracket and home court locked through the conference finals \u2014 the season has gone exactly to script.<\/p><p>League executives polled this week were split on the question, but the consensus was clear on one point: the price of standing still in this conference is higher than the price of overpaying. The teams at the top are not waiting around.<\/p><p>Scouts who have tracked this draft class since last summer keep coming back to the same word: physicality. The lottery names carry NBA frames already, and the workout circuit is only sharpening the separation at the top of the board.<\/p><p>Home crowds have been worth real points this spring. The building was loud from the opening tip, and the third-quarter surge that decided the game was fueled by three straight defensive stops that brought the arena to its feet.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A 65-win pace, the youngest core in the bracket and home court locked through the conference finals \u2014 the season has gone exactly to script.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-league-news","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}