The Oklahoma City Thunder are the defending champions, with a talented roster that should set them up for years of success, so it makes sense that they'd have their share of detractors. A team at the top always does. There are other reasons why a neutral observer might not root for them: the origins of how OKC got an NBA team, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's reliance on drawing fouls, that "What a Pro Wants" commercial. That's just sports writ large: You can accept that people will hate your team for some rational or irrational reason, or you can try to argue with all of them and achieve the same level of success as trying to fight the ocean. If you pick the latter option, at least try to make sure your argument doesn't sound insane.
According to Eitan Reshef's bio, he's a native Oklahoman now based in Chicago, and works in digital commerce. He's not a regular columnist for the Oklahoman. While Reshef's article appeared under the publication's URL, it's a guest column for the opinion section and carries the following disclaimer at the top: "This piece expresses the views of its author(s), separate from those of this publication." Actually, it was a guest column; the article was deleted sometime Monday afternoon, hours after it was published. You might understand why when you see the headline: "Like Thunder, Israel is an underdog that has become hated."
Here's the opening paragraph:
It’s NBA Playoffs season, and once again as fans are glued to their televisions. There is something strangely familiar abrew between the online keyboard warriors and the voices of punditry as they respond to the continued dominance of the Oklahoma City Thunder. A young, disciplined, strategically crafted organization, impeccably drafted and relentlessly adherent to a culture of selflessness and community, suddenly finds itself resented. The greater the Thunder’s success becomes, the more critics seem determined to diminish it or even root for its demise.
Even if this column were only about the Thunder and nothing else, this seems like a bad way to present them as a sympathetic subject. Also, there's an extraneous "as" in the very first sentence. Moving on:
As both a fiercely proud Oklahoman and a Jew, the parallels between the Thunder and the nation of Israel are difficult to ignore. Neither was supposed to become what it is.
Oklahoma City remains one of the NBA’s smallest markets. We lack the glamour of Los Angeles, the nightlife and beaches of Miami, Florida, or the finance and media power of New York City. Yet we built something remarkable anyway. Rather than buying relevance, we created it. Rather than following others, we reimagined our own path to success by relying on the resources and skills we had with discipline and our own brand of resilience.
Israel’s story shares many of those attributes — a young, microscopic nation limited in natural resources, surrounded by hostility, perpetually under scrutiny, and constantly forced to justify its actions and existence. Israel nonetheless transformed itself into a global powerhouse of innovation, technology, defense, medicine and agriculture. Like the Thunder and even Oklahoma City, it has risen out of the ashes of a traumatic past despite all odds.
Before going any further, I can tell you right now: Nowhere in this column are the Seattle SuperSonics, Howard Schultz, or Clay Bennett mentioned. Apparently the Thunder just popped into existence one day, a franchise without fans for fans without a franchise. Do not look up the particulars of how the team came to be. From later in the column:
The more competent and victorious the organization becomes, the more emotionally invested outsiders hope for its failure. We are witnessing that now with the Thunder. They are young, composed, and incredibly well-managed. Instead of praising the blueprint, many fans react with disdain, espousing conspiracy theories amplified by social media.
Sam Presti has drafted far fewer malcontents than the IDF, but also, this cycle is not novel to the Thunder or any sports dynasty. Your team winning means that other teams are losing, and those fans are going to hate you for it. What, are you going to go around asking people if they believe that the Oklahoma City Thunder have a right to exist?
Israel experiences a similar phenomenon on a far more consequential stage. Of course, criticism of governments and their policies is fair game. But the hyper-fixation on Israel often transcends normal criticism into deeper and darker discomfort with Jewish strength, sovereignty, and achievements. When Israel thrives across a spectrum of global stages, many observers convert healthy criticism into rabid animosity.
"A far more consequential stage" reads as an effort to inject some much-needed perspective, seven paragraphs into this bewildering argument, but it's far too late. The country committing a genocide and the NBA title favorites are not that alike, even if Lu Dort and the Israeli military both love to use dirty tactics then pretend to be the victim. Besides, everyone already knows Israel's team is the New England Patriots.
The Thunder are not hated because they somehow gamed the system. They are hated because they mastered it. Israel is not obsessively scrutinized because it failed, but due to its success despite deeply-rooted envy and darker historical motives.
All right, that's enough of that. It really is impossible to overlook that the fan of both Zionism and the Thunder declined to mention how the NBA franchise came to be in Oklahoma City. There's a lot of fixation here on creation, success, and resilience, without any acknowledgement that this NBA team was displaced from one city without any input from the people who lived there, and relocated to another city, resulting in rewritten history at the institutional level. Hm. You know what? Maybe Eitan's on to something here.
