Thunder Edge Wembanyama’s Spurs in Yahoo’s NBA Ratings Before Opening-Night Clash

Oklahoma City enters its opening-night meeting with San Antonio ahead on one preseason scorecard, but not by enough to erase the value of playing at home. That is the useful tension in Michael Fiddle’s NBA ratings: the Thunder lead the league, while Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs sit close enough that location changes the hypothetical matchup.

The Oklahoma City Thunder rank first at +8.1 in Fiddle’s Yahoo Sports preseason power ratings, published October 16. San Antonio follows at +7.4. Boston is third at +4.8, leaving a much larger gap between second and third than between the top two.

These are not official NBA rankings, and the word “Vegas” in the headline should not be read as a single, universally agreed sportsbook assessment. Fiddle builds his own ratings from regular-season win totals, title odds, injury news and the opening games already priced, then makes manual adjustments. They combine market information with an analyst’s judgment.

The distinction matters because the numbers are designed to help compare teams in points, not to predict an exact finishing order or assign a championship probability. Oklahoma City’s +8.1 does not mean eight additional wins. Nor does first place establish that the Thunder will win a playoff series against the team immediately below them.

The San Antonio Spurs trail Oklahoma City by 0.7 rating points. Fiddle uses a three-point home-court adjustment relative to a neutral venue. Applying only those published inputs would turn a hypothetical 0.7-point Thunder advantage on neutral ground into a 2.3-point Spurs advantage in San Antonio. That is an illustration of the model, not a quoted opening-night betting line.

The actual matchup arrives quickly. Yahoo’s opening-night guide lists the Thunder at the Spurs on Tuesday, October 20, at 9:30 p.m. Eastern at Frost Bank Center. One game will not settle a preseason hierarchy, but the location makes it an immediate example of why a team rating and a game forecast are different things.

There is recent competitive history behind the pairing. Oklahoma City went 64-18 last season and finished first in the Western Conference before losing a seven-game conference finals series to San Antonio, according to Yahoo’s Thunder season preview. A higher preseason rating therefore does not reverse the result of their last postseason meeting. It describes expectations entering a new campaign.

For San Antonio, the ranking puts a number on the anticipation surrounding Wembanyama’s next season without explaining every reason for it. Fiddle’s article provides the ratings and a methodology outline, not a player-by-player decomposition of the Spurs’ +7.4. Assigning a precise share of that number to Wembanyama would go beyond what he published.

The separation below the leaders is more pronounced. Boston’s +4.8 sits 2.6 points behind San Antonio and 3.3 behind Oklahoma City. Detroit and New York follow at +3.9 apiece, with Houston sixth at +3.7. On the displayed numbers, the fourth-through-sixth teams are separated by only two-tenths of a point. Their ordinal positions make that cluster look less crowded than it is.

Detroit is listed fourth and the Knicks fifth despite identical rounded ratings. Fiddle says he uses title odds to distinguish teams with equal win totals, but the published table does not expose every underlying calculation. Readers should not infer a large quality difference from a one-place ranking gap when the figures shown are the same.

New York’s placement also illustrates the limits of carrying one season’s result into the next. Eastern Herald’s coverage of the Knicks’ addition of Andre Drummond examined the roster work accompanying their title defense. Fiddle’s model still places them behind four teams, a preseason assessment rather than a revision of who won the championship.

Houston is the member of that chasing group Fiddle highlights as a potential riser. His argument rests on the anticipated returns of Steven Adams and Fred VanVleet, the addition of Marcus Smart and a relationship between offensive rebounding and open perimeter attempts. Those are his reasons for expecting improvement, not proof that health or results will follow the forecast.

San Antonio, meanwhile, has been using preseason to test combinations, including the Fox-Harper-Castle lineup Eastern Herald covered last week. Such decisions will help determine how much a paper rating survives contact with regular-season rotations. The model starts with Oklahoma City narrowly ahead; Tuesday gives both teams their first opportunity to supply new evidence.