Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt wants Canadian basketball fans to know that they've been represented at Paycom Center, the home of the NBA's Thunder, for decades.
Holt spoke about the impact of NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort on Wednesday, a day before Oklahoma City hosted the Indiana Pacers in Game 1 of the league's championship final. He said he loved the idea of the Thunder being Canada's second-favourite team behind the Toronto Raptors.
"It's always been really cool that Lu and Shai are from Canada and we've got a Canadian flag in the arena, like every NBA arena," said Holt in a video call with The Canadian Press. "I don't know if Canadians think about that, but there's a Canadian flag that's been hanging in Oklahoma City for 20 years now, and it probably has even more meaning for Dort and Gilgeous-Alexander that it's there."
The NBA Finals will have four Canadians competing for the championship for the first time. Hamilton's Gilgeous-Alexander and Montreal's Dort will be in the Thunder's backcourt and Andrew Nembhard of Aurora, Ont., and Montreal's Bennedict Mathurin both play guard for the Pacers.
"All of it is surreal to me, as somebody who grew up here and always felt in the 80s and 90s like Oklahoma City was in an alternate universe, and nobody around the country and certainly around the world would ever pay us any mind," said Holt, who noted that the Thunder had fans in New Zealand when Steven Adams was a member of the team and supporters in Australia when Josh Giddey played in OKC. "But since the arrival of the NBA, you have this new international component to our profile that is really important to us now.
"Of course, the NBA is uniquely positioned to do that. There are really only two international sports that are played everywhere: soccer and basketball."
That international attention is by design.
Originally a railroad town, Oklahoma City suffered economically after the United States Interstate Highway System was built. The oil crisis of the 1970s compounded those problems as energy is one of the state's major industries.
Mayor Ronald J. Norick introduced a radical capital improvement program called MAPS (Metropolitan Area Projects) in 1993, designed to build new or upgraded sports, recreation, entertainment, cultural and convention facilities in an effort to diversify and stimulate the economy. That included the construction of an NBA-sized arena, now Paycom Center, as its centrepiece.
"People don't invest in or visit cities they've never heard of and so suddenly, for the next couple of weeks, billions of people will at least give a passing glance to what is going on in the NBA Finals," said Holt. "Some of them will just check the score, but others will actually watch the games, and they'll see images of Oklahoma City and they'll think about us in a way that maybe they never have before.
"We'll capitalize on that opportunity, really, for years to come."
That's why it was so important for a new publicly-owned arena to be built in the city's downtown core, said Holt. Construction on the new venue — also called Paycom Center — has begun across the street from the existing arena and will be the home of the Thunder beyond 2050.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 4, 2025.
John Chidley-Hill, The Canadian Press
