2024-25 Thunder player grades: Isaiah Joe

The calendar has flipped to August, which means we've officially hit the low point of the NBA cycle. The next couple of months are the driest part of the year. Everybody has headed to vacation and awaits training camp to kick off the 2025-26 season.

The Oklahoma City Thunder continue to enjoy their NBA championship. They had a historic 68-14 regular-season campaign that eventually led to the franchise's first title with a 2025 NBA Finals Game 7 win. They'll enter next season as a favorite to be a rare repeat winner.

To reflect on their title run, Thunder Wire will conduct 2024-25 season grades for all 19 players who suited up for the squad at one point during the year. Ninth up is Isaiah Joe, who was OKC's best outside shooter and had a career season off the bench:

2024-25 statistics:

• 10.2 points
• 2.6 rebounds
• 1.6 assists
• 44.0% shooting
• 41.2% 3-point shooting
• 82.1% free-throw shooting

Advanced stats:

• True-shooting percentage: 61.7%
• Usage rate: 17.2%
• 3-point attempt rate: 79.3%
• Win shares: 5.1
• VORP: 1.4

Significant Percentile Finishes:

• Transition scorer: 88.3 percentile
• Spot-up: 82.1 percentile
• Off screen: 81.4 percentile

Contract:

• 2025-26: $12.4 million
• 2026-27: $11.3 million
• 2027-28: $11.3 million (team option)

Thoughts:

Celebrating the NBA championship in his Arkansas hometown, Joe is another one of the Thunder's developmental success stories. From being a late 2022 training camp invite to an important role player, he was another guy who had a career season that ended with a ring.

Joe averaged career highs across the board. It was his first double-digit scoring season. The 26-year-old upticked his outside shooting volume, and it paid off. He shot 41% from the outside on over six attempts. Pretty impressive stuff. Only five other players reached those numbers last season, headlined by Kevin Durant.

Everything came together for Joe. He benefited the most from the defensive attention Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams received. He lit up the baskets with his catch-and-shoot looks. That has always been the case since he arrived in OKC three seasons ago. He's the exact type of player you want to surround drive-heavy scorers as a kick-out option. That likely explains why he's always a plus-minus darling.

The Thunder saw Joe become a more threatening scorer. Before this past season, he had zero 30-point outbursts. In this year alone, he had four and scored a career-high 33 points. You always need role players to have career campaigns to compete for a championship, and that's what happened here.

Playing a two-man action with Isaiah Hartenstein in the bench lineups also opened a new flavor to his shot diet. Joe received plenty of quality looks from simple DHOs run by the seven-footer. Reminiscent of his time with Donte DiVincenzo, Hartenstein was able to direct the sharpshooter through traffic and let off good looks from deep.

Joe is also a sneaky athlete. He had a few poster-worthy dunks. The 26-year-old showed his driving in transition. He could surprise folks and put the ball down instead of just being a textbook outside shooter only. The defense is questionable at times because of his skinny frame, but the Thunder can stomach a couple of below-average defenders. He's really found a role in the NBA and has been one of OKC's better finds in its rebuild off the waiver wire.

Moving Forward:

Just keep doing what you're doing. That's been the message for the entire Thunder roster. When you have such a historic season, you hope to replicate it. For Joe, that means continuing to be a high-volume outside shooter who makes defenses pay for collapsing into the paint.

While he's not one-dimensional, Joe's bread and butter will always be his outside shot. It's what saved his NBA career. It's what landed him a hefty contract extension last summer. He was the perfect bench player who could help the offense mitigate Gilgeous-Alexander's resting. His off-ball movement forced defenses to always keep an eye on him.

Consistency and availability are two important variables in Joe's favor. Knock on wood. He's played 70-plus games for three straight seasons and averaged a career-best 22 minutes last season. Even with his playoff struggles, that type of reliability is immensely valuable during the grind of the regular season. To have a sharpshooter soak up so many minutes helps everybody out in the long run.

There was some online chatter that the Thunder should move Joe after his inconsistent playoff run. He only averaged 10 minutes and slowly fizzled out of the rotation with a handful of DNPs. The outside shot became unreliable. But you can't throw away his regular-season production. Especially after you won the championship.

Joe has proven to be a consistent role player who can spread the floor. Outside shooting is always a hot commodity in the NBA. The Thunder have that in him on a team-friendly salary. No point in getting rid of that simply because he had a bad two months. He's OKC's most talented outside shooter and has contributed to winning at a high level. Now it's about repeating that production for next season.

Final Grade: A

This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: 2024-25 Thunder player grades: Isaiah Joe