Ben Stiller, Like Everyone Else, Fears the Oklahoma City Thunder

The Oklahoma City Thunder are a machine.

The defending NBA champions posted the league’s best regular-season record at 64-18. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, in all likelihood, will be named the back-to-back NBA MVP on Sunday. The Thunder swept the eighth-seeded Phoenix Suns without breaking a sweat in the first round of the playoffs. When Gilgeous-Alexander had a relatively quiet series against the Los Angeles Lakers, it didn’t matter. The Thunder swept them, too.

So, here they are, in the Western Conference Finals. They’ll face the San Antonio Spurs, the only team in the league to have Oklahoma City’s number this season. The Spurs went 3-1 against the Thunder in the regular season - 4-1, if you count the NBA Cup - and pose the most tangible threat to derailing the Thunder’s bid to repeat as champions.

Ben Stiller, as famous for his die-hard New York Knicks fandom as his iconic acting and producing, hopes the Spurs’ regular-season success translates to the Western Conference Finals.

“I will be rooting for San Antonio in the WCF,” Stiller posted on X on Friday night.

“Only Thunder we support for the next two weeks is Tropic,” SiriusXM NBA Radio host Rob Perez replied, referencing the Stiller-directed 2008 comedy “Tropic Thunder.”

The Thunder are so scary that Stiller is actively hoping the Knicks face Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-4 unanimous Defensive Player of the Year nicknamed “The Alien.”

By the way, the Knicks still have to reach the 2026 NBA Finals for this to matter. New York has been plenty scary on the Eastern Conference side of the bracket, too, having won seven straight games - most recently hammering the Philadelphia 76ers by 30 points to complete the series sweep last Sunday.

The Knicks are still waiting to learn which team they’ll face in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Cleveland Cavaliers and Detroit Pistons will play Game 7 on Sunday night to determine that. Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals between the Spurs and Thunder tips off at 8:30 p.m. EST on Monday.

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This story was originally published May 16, 2026 at 3:43 PM.