This week in 2008: The Thunder play their first game and fall 98-87 to the Bucks as Russell Westbrook debuts with 13 points

The Oklahoma City Thunder played the first regular-season game in franchise history on Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 18 years ago this week, and lost 98-87 to the Milwaukee Bucks before a sellout crowd of 19,136 at the Ford Center. The score was forgettable. The night itself was not: four months after the Seattle SuperSonics announced they were leaving for Oklahoma, a city that had never had a permanent major-league team finally had one.

A slow start under the new lights

Coach P.J. Carlesimo started Kevin Durant, Jeff Green, Earl Watson, Nick Collison and Johan Petro, with a rookie named Russell Westbrook coming off the bench. After a pregame show with pyrotechnics, a new team flag and a welcome from Mayor Mick Cornett to Commissioner David Stern, the Thunder looked every bit like a team in its first week together. Milwaukee won the first quarter 24-14, led 50-35 at halftime and stretched the margin to 79-59 after three quarters.

Durant, in his second NBA season, scored 12 points on 5-of-14 shooting, missed all three of his three-point attempts and committed four turnovers. Westbrook, the No. 4 pick from UCLA, was better in his NBA debut: 13 points, four rebounds and four assists in just under 22 minutes. Chris Wilcox also scored 13 off the bench and Desmond Mason added 11. As a team, Oklahoma City shot 43.8 percent, made only 1 of 6 threes and turned the ball over 20 times.

The Bucks had three 20-point scorers. Richard Jefferson had 20 with eight rebounds, Charlie Villanueva had 20 and 12 rebounds, and Michael Redd scored 20 on 7-of-18 shooting. Andrew Bogut added 14 points and seven rebounds, and Milwaukee won the boards 43-35.

The fourth quarter that hinted at something

The home team did not quit. The Thunder won the last quarter 28-19, and the box score shows where the push came from: over the full game, every Oklahoma City reserve who played finished with a positive plus-minus, led by Mason at plus-11, while all five starters were in the minus column. It was not enough to make the final minutes close, but it was the first glimpse of a team that would get better quickly.

What it led to

The first win came four nights later, 88-85 over the Minnesota Timberwolves at home on November 2. The wins after that were rare. Oklahoma City lost 12 of its first 13 games, Carlesimo was fired on November 22 and assistant Scott Brooks took over on an interim basis before being named the full-time coach on April 15, 2009. The Thunder finished 23-59.

The rebuild had its foundation anyway. Durant averaged 25.3 points that season, and Westbrook made the All-Rookie First Team. A year later the Thunder were in the playoffs, in 2012 they reached the NBA Finals, and in June 2025 they won the franchise’s first championship in Oklahoma City behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. All of it traces back to an 11-point loss on a Wednesday night in October, when a new city learned what an NBA crowd sounds like.