For the last few years, the Las Vegas Raiders have not been a very good football team. They’ve won just 18 combined games over the last three seasons, the sixth-fewest in the NFL. They also won just four last season, finishing tied for the fourth-worst record in the NFL (behind three teams that won three games). Over the longer term, the Raiders have been even worse. They’ve been to the playoffs just twice since 2002, and only the decrepit Cleveland Browns have a worse record during that span.
But star edge rusher Maxx Crosby sees hope in the Raiders’ situation, inspired by another team that not so long ago was losing a lot of games but recently climbed the mountain and won a championship: the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder.
“We just saw it in the NBA: OKC, just a couple years ago, was one of the worst teams in the league,” Crosby said, per The Athletic. “But they had a lot of young guys, they trusted the process, they developed and now they’re the world champions. We’re trying to win. I want to win so badly. I put everything into it. I want everybody else to think like that. And that’s been my goal, just bringing as many guys along as I possibly can.”
Crosby’s right. The Thunder went 22-50 in the COVID-shortened 2021 season, then 24-58 and 2022. They somewhat surprisingly showed dramatic improvement in 2023, going 40-42 and losing in the play-in tournament. The last two years, they have won the top seed in the Western Conference, going 57-25 in 2024 and 68-14 in 2025. In the latter season, they had the best point differential of all time and won the first title in OKC history, led by the league’s MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) and one of the best defenses in recent memory.
The Raiders … are not in the same position as the Thunder. At least not in the one the Thunder were in coming into the 2024-25 season. Oklahoma City had just won 57 games and lost in the second round of the playoffs to the eventual Western Conference champions, was armed with a player who had just finished second in MVP voting (SGA) and two worthy co-stars with All-Star potential (Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren), plus arguably the deepest roster in the entire league, with players like Lu Dort, Isaiah Hartenstein, Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, Cason Wallace and more capable of contributing at a high level not just in the regular season, but during the playoffs. And they had all that ammo despite being one of the youngest teams in the NBA.
Of course, it seems unlikely that Crosby was comparing last season’s Raiders to this season’s Thunder. That would be crazy. Again, they went just 4-13 last season. That’s very much like the 2022 Thunder going 24-58. So, perhaps Crosby is merely hoping that his team can take the kind of step forward that the Thunder took in 2023, where they stepped into the fringes of the playoff race in a way that surprised a lot of onlookers.
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The Thunder entered that season with an over/under of just 23.5 wins and were tied for the worst title odds in the NBA. Nobody expected them to be good. The Raiders are coming into this season with an over/under of just 5.5 wins at FanDuel Sportsbook. They are +310 to make the playoffs and +10000 to win the Super Bowl, odds that rank sixth-worst and seventh-worst, respectively, in the league. Nobody expects them to be good.
The difference here is that the Raiders don’t have anyone who is remotely equivalent to SGA. Geno Smith is a heck of a lot better at quarterback than what the Raiders had their last year with Aidan O’Connell and Desmond Ridder, but he is a lot closer to being a league-average quarterback than he is to being an MVP. Vegas is probably hoping that Ashton Jeanty can be that kind of player, but running backs just don’t drive NFL success in the same way that superstars do in the NBA. They’re very dependent on team context, and the Raiders’ team context is, kindly, not great.
They’re going to need to pull an inside straight to even be competitive in the AFC West, let alone in the conference as a whole. They play in the same division as the Kansas City Chiefs, who win the division every year. And they play in the same division as the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Chargers, each of which made the playoffs last season. The Raiders have six games against those teams, plus four against the NFC East. They do luck out and play the AFC South, but that’s cold comfort for a team that was very bad last year and has an above-average strength of schedule.
Maybe everything does work out for the Raiders and they make a push for a wild-card spot. It seems highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened before. It’s hard right now, though, to see the path to them quickly becoming one of the very best teams in the NFL and the Super Bowl champions. Smith will turn 35 years old in October and is likely entering the decline phase of his career. If the Raiders don’t win big very soon, it’s more likely that they’ll be starting all over again than hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. And the idea of them winning soon seems pretty outlandish considering their situation.
