Thunder break NBA record for total points in a season, including playoffs

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Thunder break NBA record for total points in a season, including playoffs

2025-06-14 10:31 Last Updated At：10:41

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A record for Oklahoma City: No team in NBA history has scored more points in a season than the Thunder.

It's a nuanced record, taking into account both regular season and playoff games. And technically, the Thunder would have broken the record on Wednesday if their appearance in the NBA Cup championship game — which is considered an exhibition — counted in any league totals.

But now, no matter how one counts, it belongs to the Thunder. They came into Game 4 of the NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers needing 68 points for the record and got it on a free throw by NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with 6:09 left in the third quarter on Friday night.

That gave the Thunder 12,162 for the season, breaking the mark of 12,161 scored by the Golden State Warriors in 104 games during the 2018-19 season. Friday's game was the 102nd official contest for the Thunder this season. (They scored 81 points in the NBA Cup championship game loss to Milwaukee in December, a point total and outcome that doesn't factor into any season stats.)

The total-points record is the latest entry on a history-making season for the Thunder, who set a franchise record with 68 regular-season wins and — if they win the NBA title — would become the fourth team in league history to post at least 84 victories in a full season. Only Golden State (88 wins in 2015-16), Chicago (87 in 1995-96) and the Bulls again (84 in 1996-97) have reached 84 wins in a season.

“I think there’s just a lot of integrity to the team,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said when asked how the team doesn't seem fazed by its numbers. “I think that starts with the makeup that these guys have. Great psychological makeup, competitive makeup, personal makeup. Then over time we’ve had to really kind of forge into this version of ourselves, in visible spaces.”

The total-points mark is obviously fueled by longevity of the season. The Thunder were only fourth in points per game during the regular season behind Cleveland, Memphis and Denver, and when adding in playoffs Oklahoma City's scoring average this season was only 27th in NBA history.

That said, no matter how the finals end, it has been a season that will be in the Thunder record books for a long time. In addition to the scoring, the Thunder are currently second all-time in average point differential per game (12.2 entering Friday) behind only the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks.

It helps illustrate how big a turnaround the Thunder have enjoyed after going 22-50 in the 2020-21 season, then 24-58 a year later and 40-42 the year after that.

“We haven’t relied on anything outside the outcomes,” Daigneault said. “The noise, we haven’t relied on that when we weren’t winning. We haven’t relied on that while we were building. We haven’t relied on that while we were rising. We’re not relying on that now that we’re in a different position.”

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba

Paris couture week opens with Cardi B holding a live crow at Schiaparelli’s spectacle

2025-07-07 21:17 Last Updated At：21:21

PARIS (AP) — Paris couture week opened not with sequins or red carpet pageantry, but with a black-feathered omen. Cardi B, wrapped in a custom Schiaparelli gown of graphic fringe, stood beneath the gilded columns of the Petit Palais, holding a live crow on her arm. The bird squawked, glared, and nearly lunged — setting the tone for a show that soared straight into the surreal.

It was a fitting image for Schiaparelli. Elsa Schiaparelli, the house’s founder, built her legend in the 1930s by weaving the unexpected —l obster dresses, shoe hats, and, yes, animals — into the heart of high fashion. That legacy pulsed through Daniel Roseberry’s Fall 2025 collection, a spectacle in pure black and white, staged as if the city itself had been drained of color, leaving only stark contrast and raw emotion.

Inside, the mood was cinematic — sharp tailoring, sweeping gowns, hints of disco sheen flickering like film across the runway. But if the house has been criticized in the past for relying on extreme corsetry and body manipulation, this season marked a shift. Roseberry, perhaps heeding the critics, abandoned his signature corset silhouette. In its place: a freer, more elastic exploration of the body, echoing Schiaparelli’s own restless spirit.

Roseberry said the collection was inspired by the moment in 1940, when Elsa Schiaparelli fled Nazi-occupied Paris for New York — a period “when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it.”

Here, that tension was alive in every look: archival codes reimagined, but with a restless push toward the future. Dresses undulated like car bodies, hips arced in impossibly engineered shapes, ribbons from antique Lyon couture fluttered as kinetic sculptures.

Yet the show was more than spectacle. This was couture at its most essential — an ideas factory for the entire fashion industry, unfettered by trends.

“Chanel was interested in how clothes could be of practical use to women; Elsa was interested in what fashion could be,” Roseberry added.

It is this what-if energy, the transformation of memory, myth, and sheer technique into something never seen before, that keeps couture vital, even as the world rushes toward AI and disposable fast fashion.

The setting only heightened the effect. The Petit Palais is currently home to an exhibit on Charles Worth, the 19th-century Englishman who invented haute couture by bringing artistry and handcraft to Paris. The symmetry was irresistible: in these halls, Schiaparelli’s past collided with fashion’s future, reminding all why couture matters: not as museum piece, but as living laboratory for risk, reinvention, and radical beauty.

A decade after its relaunch, Schiaparelli has found commercial traction and become a fixture on the world’s red carpets, a rare feat in today’s luxury market. But above all, the brand’s power lies in its ability to surprise. On opening day, as Cardi B’s crow threatened to take flight, Schiaparelli proved that in Paris, fashion’s most potent magic is still the unexpected.