The Optimal Amount
of Suffering

In 2014, I met Kevin Durant and posted a selfie with seven exclamation points. Less than two years later, I was burning his jersey.

In the 2016 NBA Western Conference finals, the Oklahoma City Thunder took a 3–1 series lead over the Golden State Warriors, a team who had just posted the best regular-season record in NBA history. OKC needed just one more win to reach the NBA Finals. Instead, they lost three straight.² Then the Warriors blew a 3–1 lead of their own and lost the Finals to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Two weeks after that, Durant, OKC’s star and former MVP, announced he was joining the Warriors.³ I, along with all of Oklahoma, felt betrayed.

Nearly a decade later, the Thunder won their first NBA championship.⁴ I would have gladly skipped the years of pain and suffering, but at the championship parade, those years were part of what I was celebrating. I had kept caring long enough to see my team win a title.

Losing can make a championship mean more. It can also make you stop watching. So is there a right amount of losing? An optimal amount of suffering? ESPN already ranks which fan bases suffer most.⁵ I care less about who suffers most than about how suffering and fulfillment trade off for one fan base over time.

So I built a way to score how a season feels and tested it on the two teams I grew up with. The Thunder lost a lot, then won it all. OU won a lot and kept coming up short.

What goes into that feeling?

The index has five ingredients. The records come from public data,⁷ and the weights come from my personal opinion, which I will defend at any bar in Chicago willing to put the Thunder game on.

1. Winning. A .500 season is worth 0. A .750 season is worth +2: a very good year, but it leaves room at the top for a title. A team that wins a quarter of its games gets −2.
   Why only +2?

   If a great record alone could get you near +10, a championship would have nowhere left to go. A straight line through .500 → 0 and .750 → +2 works out to 4 × (2 × win% − 1), so the record by itself spans −4 (winless) to +4 (unbeaten). One honest caveat: the line is symmetric, and fans are not. An analysis of three million happiness reports from 32,000 people found that the pain of a loss is more than double the joy of a win.³⁷ Treating wins and losses equally is generous to bad teams.

2. Improvement. Up to ±3 for beating, or falling short of, your average over the last three seasons.
   Why the last three seasons?

   Nobody experiences a season in a vacuum. Economists call this a reference point: we feel outcomes as gains or losses relative to where we started, and losses loom larger.³⁸ Later work argues the reference point is what we expected to happen.³⁹ Three seasons is about one roster cycle. A 20-point jump in win percentage, about 16 more NBA wins, earns the full +3.

3. Title afterglow. A championship adds +6, and the glow halves every two years.
   Why does it fade?

   Because joy wears off. In a classic study, lottery winners were not measurably happier than people who had not won, and they took less pleasure in everyday things.⁴⁰ Two years is my estimate of how long it takes before someone asks, “Sure, but can you repeat?” Six points plus a strong record reaches the +10 cap, so a first title and a dynasty can both max out.

4. Unfinished business. Every recent good season that did not end in a title costs up to 0.4, capped at −2 over five years. Call it the OU football tax.
   Why punish good seasons?

   If expectations are the reference point, a near-miss registers as a loss.³⁹ A .750 season without a title counts in full. The five-season cap means frustration can dent a winning record but never erase it.

5. Off-field rupture. A departure can hurt before the team plays another game. For my two teams, I assign −5 when Durant and Lincoln Riley left and −2 for the James Harden trade, each fading with a two-year half-life. These are my feelings, not estimates. Media psychologists call this a parasocial breakup,⁸ which is a very dignified name for setting a jersey on fire.

Add them up, keep the total between −10 and +10, and you have the index.

Is this science? Partly. The records are real and every weight is written down so it can be argued. It is also not just win percentage in a trench coat: win percentage explains about two-thirds of the score,⁹ and the other third is where the feelings live.

It passes the smell test, mostly. The most miserable NBA season in the data belongs to the 2011–12 Charlotte Bobcats, whose 7–59 record is the worst winning percentage in league history. Next come Houston the season it traded James Harden and Cleveland the season after LeBron James’s “Decision.”¹⁰ So departures show up even when the index only sees the scoreboard. Its biggest blind spot is the playoffs: the happiest NBA season without a title belongs to the 73–9 Warriors, who blew a 3–1 lead in the Finals.¹¹ Golden State’s fix for that heartbreak was signing Kevin Durant about two weeks later. I’m told it helped.

The most miserable season in college football belongs to UCF’s 0–12 team in 2015. Two years later, UCF went 13–0 and threw itself a national-championship parade at Disney World.¹² The index gives that season a 5.9, because UCF’s title was not official (sorry UCF fans).

Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden made success feel natural for the Thunder in the early 2010s. We reached the Finals in 2012; surely a championship would follow. Instead, Harden was traded that October,¹³ and you know how 2016 went. Losing the series hurt, but Durant’s decision and his lack of transparency made it personal. He lost any goodwill he had in Oklahoma forever.

The next season, Westbrook averaged a triple-double on his way to league MVP.¹⁴ Was that season powered by spite? The Thunder won 47 games, eight fewer than the year before. Westbrook’s spite, it turns out, is great for triple-doubles and mediocre for wins and titles.

Did Durant’s exit hurt the team, or just me?

Short answer: me, definitely. The team, somewhere between seven wins per season and none, depending on which comparison you trust. The index’s departure penalty measures my reaction; the standings need a different test, built around an annoying fact: great teams usually get worse anyway. Statisticians call it regression to the mean, and it has been spoiling sports narratives since Francis Galton first described it in 1886.¹⁵ So the real question is whether OKC got worse than similar teams did over the same seasons. The tool for that is called difference-in-differences, the same design economists used to study New Jersey’s minimum-wage increase at fast-food restaurants.¹⁶ I also happened to use it for my master’s dissertation back in 2023.

The catch is finding similar teams. The five whose records looked most like OKC’s all lost a star of their own. The summer Durant left, Tim Duncan retired (his last game was a playoff loss to the Thunder) and Dwyane Wade left Miami.¹⁷ The next summer, the Clippers traded Chris Paul, Memphis let Zach Randolph walk, and Indiana traded Paul George to… Oklahoma City.¹⁸ A comparison group that is busy losing its own stars cannot tell you what losing a star did.¹⁹ So I threw out every team that lost or added a recent All-Star between the summer of 2016 and the end of the 2018–19 season.²⁰ Twenty teams made a move like that. Of the eight teams left, the five whose records looked most like OKC’s became the comparison group.

Against teams that stood pat, OKC won about seven fewer games per season (8.7 points of win percentage). Every version of the screen I tried lands between 5.6 and 10.1 points worse. So Durant’s exit hurt the team. Probably.

Probably, because none of those eight teams were as good as OKC, and great teams fall back toward .500 on their own. Since 2002, NBA teams that won about two-thirds of their games over four seasons, as OKC did, saw their win percentage fall 15.4 points over the next three. OKC’s, minus Durant, fell 8.2.²¹ Next to teams that good, the Thunder held up better than most.

No team was both as good as OKC and quiet that summer, so there is no perfect comparison, only two imperfect ones. One says Durant cost the Thunder about seven wins per season. The other says he cost them nothing they were not about to lose anyway. The truth is somewhere in between, which is the long way of saying the classic economist line: it depends. So, the team or just me? The standings took a dent. Oklahoma took the rest.

The long way to +10

Durant’s exit was not the bottom. In July 2019, the Thunder traded Paul George to the Clippers and Westbrook to Houston and started over.²² Then came the part of the recipe nobody orders: 22–50, 24–58, and 40–42, three straight losing seasons. The George trade had brought back a 20-year-old guard named Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. In 2025 he was the league’s MVP, and the Thunder went 68–14 and won the title.²³

I was eleven months old when OU won its last national championship in January 2001.²⁴ Since then, there have been title games, Heismans, and enough winning football to make complaining about it seem unreasonable.

The problem with being good every year is that each year gives you a new reason to think this might finally be it. Think: a 31–17 halftime lead in the 2018 Rose Bowl that ended in a double-overtime loss to Georgia.²⁶

Then, in my last year at OU in 2021, Lincoln Riley left for USC in the middle of the night.²⁷ Riley took assistant coaches with him, including his defensive coordinator, Alex Grinch,²⁸ and many standout players, most notably Caleb Williams, who would go on to win the Heisman the next season.²⁹ Riley’s exit felt eerily like Durant’s. We had been imagining our future around someone who was now building it somewhere else. OU finished that 2021 season 11–2. That record tells you very little about how the end of that year felt.

Did Riley’s exit hurt the team?

On the field, yes, at least at first. OU’s comparison group had the same problem as OKC’s: its closest match, Notre Dame, lost Brian Kelly to LSU about a day after Riley left.³⁰ So I applied the same fix and threw out every program whose head coach left between the start of the 2021 season and the end of 2023.³¹ Sixty-four programs made a change like that, which tells you all you need to know about job security in college football. Against the five closest of the sixty-one that kept their coach, OU’s 6–7 season in 2022 came in about four wins short of expectation, and 2023 landed right back on the expected path. Every version I tried puts 2022 somewhere between 27 and 36 points below expectation.

Recruiting, the damage fans feared most, largely did not happen. OU’s 2022 class still finished eighth nationally, and the 2023 class, Brent Venables’s first full one, ranked fifth.³² Venables came from Clemson, one of the comparison programs that kept its head coach,³³ so part of OU’s recovery was imported from the control group.

Then something funny happened. OU went 6–7 again in 2024, its first year in the SEC, and 10–3 in 2025. On results alone, the index scores that 10–3 at +4.0, OU’s best since 2004 and higher than any of the 12–2 seasons in between. Same program, fewer wins, lower bar.

So what is the optimal amount of suffering?

The index has an answer, and OU just gave it away. A bad season helps in exactly one way: it lowers the bar.

To show how far that goes, I created a hypothetical NBA team and gave it three different run-ups to winning a ring: no losing seasons, one, or three.

With no losing seasons, contending without winning scores zero: six straight 53-win seasons earn +1.2 for winning, −1.2 in unfinished business. Good record, zero joy. OU fans will recognize the feeling. One losing season changes the title itself. The index measures every season against the three before it, so after a bad year the title counts as a big jump and clears some unfinished business, lifting it from 8.5 to the maximum of 10.

That perfect ending costs something: one losing season drags the seven-year average from +1.2 to +0.6. More losing buys nothing, because the title is already at the top of the scale; three bad years just sink the average to −0.7. If fans kept a running average, the optimal amount of suffering would be zero. We don’t.

Memory keeps highlights, not averages. In a famous experiment, people chose to repeat a longer cold-water ordeal over a shorter one, as long as the longer one ended a little less painfully. Colonoscopy patients remembered their procedures by the worst moment and the last few minutes, not by how long they lasted.³⁴ Psychologists call this duration neglect. If fandom works the same way, the number of bad seasons matters less than how bad the worst one was and how the story ended. (For the record, the 2021–22 Thunder were a colonoscopy.) Allen Parducci argued back in 1968 that how good something feels depends on where it falls within the range of what you have lived through.³⁵ The 24–58 season is part of why 68–14 felt like everything.

The catch is that you have to still be there at the end. On the field alone, the index cannot push a fan below −8.6; getting all the way to “I’m done” takes a betrayal or a moving van.

So here is my answer. The optimal amount of suffering is just enough to reset your expectations. In the index, one losing season does it. The Thunder, being thorough, had three. Every season beyond that is not character building. It is just suffering.

The Thunder’s title mattered because we cared through the trades and the betrayals. That was the romantic part.

My answer comes from one made-up team. Real fan bases have been running the experiment for decades, mostly without their consent. Find the season your team hit bottom, and count how long it took to climb out.