The NBA Finals Ended in Dramatic Fashion. That's Nothing Compared to What I Watched the Players Do After.

The Oklahoma City Thunder, who won the NBA championship last night after maintaining a league-best record all season, is extremely young. Seriously: The average age of the roster is 25, and its second- and third-best players—Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams—were born in 2002 and 2001, respectively.

This bodes well for the future of the franchise. The Thunder has discovered a winning formula with ridiculously oppressive perimeter defense, which transforms the boundless hardwood into a stuffy, overcrowded elevator. As the team matures, it'll surely marry those skills with a more refined offensive know-how, which makes it seem likely that more titles are on the way. (When Vegas put out odds for the 2026 champions right after the final buzzer, the Thunder was already the heavy favorite.) In short, that means that the NBA might be on the cusp of its first Gen Z dynasty, represented by a raft of players running rampant through the sports world who possess no living memories of 9/11.

This is good news for them. However, if you're a longtime basketball fan—and, you know, were born before the year 2000—you might find this a little bit disorienting, especially when you take a look at how the Thunder, erm, “partied” after hoisting the Larry O'Brien trophy.

That, dear reader, is a bunch of twentysomethings asking Alex Caruso—one of the Thunder's oldest players, at 31 —how to pop champagne . This means that some of the youngest, hottest, richest, and most famous athletes on the planet have never internalized such a sacred sports ritual on their own and instead must rely on the ancient millennial wisdom of a man born during the first Clinton administration. You know all of those statistics you read about how zoomers drink far less than their generational antecedents? That their social life is increasingly isolated and digitized? Here is living proof. These young men have climbed the mountaintop, and they look as if they'd rather be home playing Fortnite .

It gets worse. Later in the video, ostensibly after Caruso teaches his teammates the art of cracking a bottle, we bear witness to one of the tamest, saddest, and most awkward champagne baths ever committed to film. The Thunder players gingerly peel back the foil on the glass as if they're trying to preserve it for wrapping paper. They spray the booze as if they're trying to water petunias. Look how goddamn dry everyone is! Look at those dozens and dozens of unopened bottles of champagne sitting on the table. What has happened to the game I love?

It must be reiterated that basketball players, traditionally, love to party. There is a photo of Chris Bosh, after winning the NBA championship in 2012, dumping an entire bottle of bubbly over his head, to the point that he looks to be covered in amniotic fluid (or, if you want to be cruder, something else). When the Golden State Warriors took home the title in 2017, they reportedly dropped $150,000 at the club . (How much of that was consumed versus sprayed at each other with giddy abandon we'll probably never know.) But the 2020s have brought with them a recession in debauchery. I was not surprised at all to hear Williams, the Thunder's supposedly superhuman small forward, tell ESPN's Tim MacMahon that yesterday evening was the first time in his life that he has consumed alcohol. I imagine that a chill ran up Michael Jordan's spine.

I suppose it should be said that alcohol is, by all biological measures, not good for you. It certainly isn't conducive to the elite athletic prowess favored by the Thunder organization, and, by and large, I'm sure members of the team's management are delighted that the core of players they've assembled aren't nightlife mainstays. This also isn't particularly surprising. One of the defining traits of this Thunder team is that off the court, the players are fairly anonymous, and that has to be associated with the fact that none of them knows how to open a bottle of champagne.

Still, as a card-carrying millennial, I must confess that this new normal is pretty alarming. The NBA champions—who have a very good chance of defending their title next year, and the year after that—are a bunch of teetotalers. Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Allen Iverson, Wilt Chamberlain, we hardly knew you. The zoomers are running this league now, and they'd rather be on a Minecraft server than in the club.