How did OKC Thunder overcome 15-0 deficit to Spurs to start Game 3?

Jogging to the top of the key, Devin Vassell knocked down the outside pull-up jumper. That was enough for the Oklahoma City Thunder to call a timeout, not even two full minutes into the game. You rarely see the reigning NBA champions look badly flustered at the jump.

The San Antonio Spurs rode their crowd's momentum with a 15-0 start. The Thunder finally scored their first points when Isaiah Hartenstein flicked up a rainbow-arc floater over Victor Wembanyama's reach. It took nearly four minutes, but OKC was finally on the scoreboard.

And then things went uphill from there. The Thunder came away with a 123-108 Game 3 win over the Spurs. The gutsy road victory put them ahead in the 2026 Western Conference Finals with a 2-1 series lead. Doing napkin math, that meant OKC outscored San Antonio 123-93 the rest of the way from that juncture.

To recover from a 15-point deficit takes the type of resilience and fortitude only built with NBA champions. You're seeing the Thunder course-correct from last year's playoff quest with another eyebrow-raising Game 3 win on the road.

Here's what the Thunder had to say when they fell behind 15-0 to the Spurs and how they recovered from it:

Mark Daigneault

"It's a 48-minute game. Reminding them that half of those points are controllable, gameplan-oriented things. In a weird way, I think that gives the team confidence when it feels more controllable. Because it gives you a sense of agency over what happens in the next 46 minutes or the next 45 minutes or whatever it was. But this team, we've been in these situations before. We understand it's a 48-minute game. You got to have to get it back on track, but you can't just wait for it to turn. You've got to make it turn. I thought we did a good job of that."

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

"We gotta go now or it'll get ugly. Let's just go out there and compete possession by possession. Guard your man one-on-one, crash the glass. If someone's guarding you, try to just have fun with the game. Just go out there and get lost in the competition. Obviously, a 15-0 deficit is pretty crazy, but there's no play that can erase it. Nothing special you can do. You've got to stack position by position. That's what we. That's what we focused on. That's all I wanted to focus on. It worked out for us."

Jaylin Williams

"I was like, geez. But just confident in our ability. A lot of things in that start were a lot of controllables. A lot of things that we cut out. I feel like our group, our team, didn't shy away from it. We stayed locked in on what we were supposed to do. As long as we stay locked in on the Thunder mentality, the Thunder way of playing basketball. I feel like there's no storm that we can overcome."

This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: How did OKC Thunder overcome 15-0 deficit to Spurs to start Game 3?