The glowing ball of love that is the Oklahoma City Thunder bounces into the fourth season of its existence with every possible reason to feel good. Feeling good, in fact, is practically the Thunder's whole mission statement. Since riding into town on a rainbow in 2008,1 the Thunder have overachieved (they made the playoffs in their second season, when they pushed the eventual-champion Lakers to six games; they won the division in their third, losing to the eventual-champion Mavericks in the Western Conference finals) while charming the town, creating one of the best fan experiences in the NBA, and soaking up all the good publicity that goes with being the closest thing the league has to the anti-Heat. A likable young superstar who's happy where he is! An inexpensively assembled roster2 of teammates who get along! I'd seen the Thunder play before, in Boston, but it wasn't 'til I saw them in OKC last year that I really got this. There was an invitation folded over the back of my seat beckoning me to something called the Hospitality Room, which turned out to be a place where they were giving away chocolate-chip cookies. Giving away, as in, for free. As many as you wanted. At one point in the third quarter, starting on my 1,200th cookie while watching Kevin Durant sink some gloriously tipsy-slanty jump shot, I glanced at the scoreboard and thought, All this and they're winning, too?

In a way, Oklahoma City is what happens when a team succeeds before it carries any real burden of history.3 The team has no hated rivals, no despised executives, no former players who've stabbed it in the back, nothing resembling bitterness or the sort of clogged sports hatred that helps the rest of us survive the winter. It's basketball as if the world were new. This year — it almost goes without saying — everyone is back, everyone is healthy, almost everyone should have improved. The team has a new $14 million practice facility. It has Durant, basketball's happy supernova, fre...