OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Sam Presti put Oklahoma City's first NBA championship team together in an unconventional way.
The Thunder general manager didn't make any splashy trades or break the bank in free agency. He didn't replace the coach with a bigger name during the rebuild to get the team over the top. He relied on good-old-fashioned internal development, with a few strategic additions sprinkled in.
It worked. Somehow, Oklahoma City claimed the title with the same coach and many of the same players who won 24 games four years ago.
“We have people from Canada, Serbia, the West Coast, the East Coast, middle America, France, Australia, that all come together for a collective goal,” Presti said. “There’s compassion on the team. There’s a cowboy toughness, a self-reliance that comes from being homegrown, and an essential sense of goodness.”
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was the regular-season and Finals MVP, but there were plenty of challenges. Jalen Williams, a first-time All-Star, was a force in the playoffs despite playing the entire postseason with a ligament tear in his right wrist that will require surgery. Chet Holmgren missed 50 games this season with a pelvic injury. The Thunder were among the league's leaders in games lost to injury.
Presti said the key was that the players saw challenges as opportunities. Many took advantage of their additional playing time and were better prepared to contribute during the title run.
“If you want to be the exception, you have to be willing to be exceptional,” Presti said. “That point was basically aimed at the fact that we have to be the exception to the rule. … The quest to be exceptional is met with having to do a lot of things that are unorthodox, and I felt like the team did that in a lot of ways and we were rewarded for it.”
Coach Mark Daigneault, like the team, is an unconventional success story. He coached the team’s G-League affiliate before taking over the Thunder. After winning fewer than 25 games his first two years as Thunder head coach, he’s now a champion.
Presti said Daigneault has improved over the years, and his approach to learning helped the young team stay focused. He said the team never got overwhelmed by circumstances, like losing Game 1 in both the Western Conference semifinals against Denver and the NBA Finals against Indiana, or falling apart in Game 6 at Indiana.
“I think the team saw those as, ‘Hey, this is just the next thing in front of us that we have to accomplish to achieve the goals of being a great team,’ and I don’t think anyone was inconvenienced or saw that as a catastrophic event,” Presti said. “It’s like, ‘Well, I guess this is part of the thing we have to get better at,’ and they met the moment.”
Two additions were guard Alex Caruso, who was acquired in a trade with Chicago last summer, and center Isaiah Hartenstein, who was added through free agency. Those veterans played key roles in the playoffs and helped Presti get named Executive of the Year.
Presti said the Thunder won't change much — he believes consistency brought them here. The team is positioned to do well going forward with all the key players from the youngest team to win a title since 1977 signed through at least next season.
But Presti said there is work ahead. He noted that no team has repeated since Golden State in 2017 and 2018.
“We’ll have to put our head down," he said. “We’re not entitled to anything. If you hear us approaching things differently than we have in the past, I’d be a little bit surprised by that. But we’re going to have to fight some human nature there, but I think we have the people and the characters and the program to fight for that. But we’re going to have to stack days in order to stack seasons.”
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Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti reflects on the team's first championship season during an NBA basketball press conference, Monday, June 30, 2025, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Cliff Brunt)
Oklahoma City Thunder draft picks, from left, Brooks Barnhizer and Thomas Sorber, center, pose with general manager Sam Presti during an NBA basketball news conference, Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Cliff Brunt)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
