In this edition of the Thunder mailbag, we gather questions from Thunder fans that they'd want to ask Sam Presti ahead of his preseason availability. Thunder beat writer Joel Lorenzi attempted to answer those questions, both with in his voice and with consideration of how Presti might answer.

More: OKC Thunder forward Kenrich Williams undergoes knee surgery, will miss preseason

@alex_bolerjack: We saw the first and second team in 3-point shooting in the finals, do you think the owners will be on systematic play to provide more opportunities for 3-point shots or putting the onus on players to pull the trigger more readily?

Presti would probably say a bit both. He wouldn’t dismiss the fact that the Celtics and Mavericks were first and second in 3-point attempts in the regular season, but he’d probably be quick to quip that Dallas averaged less 3-point attempts than OKC in the postseason (Dallas was sixth in the field, OKC was third).

And every member of the Thunder organization, in unison, like the androids in iRobot, would say that not all 3s are created equally. They’d be right.

OKC doesn’t necessarily prefer shots being funneled to Lu Dort in the corner over a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drive. And if Hartenstein’s screen in a dribble handoff gets a guy downhill, but the defense collapses and leaves Hartenstein open near the 3-point line, do you prefer that over getting into another action?

The quality of shots created is what matters. No team averaged more drives per game than the Thunder last season. No player averaged more drives than SGA last season. All of it was efficient, and all of it played into the drive-and-kick scheme that earned OKC the kind of 3s it likes.

The team’s play, with its new additions, should lend itself to more comfortable 3s. Hartenstein will give movement shooters room. SGA, as far as offseason Instagram workouts go, seems prepared to shoot more 3s with confidence. Chet Holmgren’s summer should’ve prepared him to do so.

The Thunder will get 3s up where Giddey should’ve but couldn’t. They’ll swap the ones he was coerced into. Alex Caruso shot almost two more 3s per game than Josh Giddey last year. Team context obviously matters. Instead of a possession ending with Giddey alone up top, perhaps it adds a SGA drive and kick because teams are forced to react and rotate with Caruso on the perimeter.

But eventually, those drive-and-kicks will reach Caruso, and his green light is the shade of lime.

More: How OKC Thunder will maximize Isaiah Hartenstein and more questions about 2024-25 offense

@RobertW6021: How to counter the Dallas playoff defense strategy of packing paint with four players?

There’s a bunch of different ways, but some of them are built in with the new additions.

It’s tougher to gap Caruso than it is Giddey. Some things, though, regardless of talent, won’t change. Summer workouts are what they are, but even in some pro runs you could catch Kevin Durant leaving Holmgren with some distance on the perimeter, to the point Holmgren is caught mentioning it to the Suns forward.

To play against SGA, for most teams, is to bring out all the stops. All the eyeballs, all the wingspans, the sturdiest of shells. Teams will have to respect certain jump shots more than their own scheme. They’ll have to respect Holmgren’s jumper consistently, as well as Dort.

But OKC’s pair of veteran offseason additions do add new wrinkles that will force defenses to make tough decisions. Hartenstein is immediately the team’s best screener. He’ll create space this team hasn’t experienced in those actions. An opposing big will need to be higher if SGA or Jalen Williams is coming off one of his dribble handoffs.

Caruso steps into the league’s hub for guard-to-guard screens as perhaps one of the NBA’s best at guard-to-guard screens. He’ll force switches and mismatches that’ll keep defenses on their toes, without relying on miscommunication like OKC tends to with its ghost screen actions.

Any time you can force a defense higher up the floor is an advantage. Those two will be wildly helpful there. The rest is up to the fickle nature of jump shooting. If last year is any indicator, OKC should be OK.

More: Which OKC Thunder games will be on national TV next season? We break down the schedule

@TokenBK1: What lessons (good and bad) from the KD-Russ era and even Russ-PG eras have you taken and applied to the current team?

Presti was asked something similar almost a year ago, in his preseason presser leading up to last season, with which he answered in blurbs:

“There's nothing harder than mental time travel, trying to predict — worse, trying to go back in time and say, oh, we should have just done it the way we're doing it now,” Presti said. “That just doesn't work.

“You can't be wise with another man's experience or knowledge. We have to go through that.

“Just the different stages that the team can go through and all the struggles that it can experience, but being a young team now is different. There's a different set of silent forces.”

He goes on to essentially talk about the impossibility of time travel — how the Minutemen couldn’t call the Air Force, how Doctor Strange and the Time Stone couldn’t have changed the trajectory of the Nets, and all the other theoretical uses we have for time travel.

The aforementioned silent forces are all the distractions players have today. If you listen to Presti, you know them well: Social media, family members and spouses, contract negotiations, ESPN’s "Around The Horn" (perhaps that’s the least silent), and the list goes on and on because it’s 2024.

If Presti was merely a study in team building and numbers when he was hired, he became well versed in ego and ambition by the end of OKC’s first era. He was burned and molded by it.

More: Which NBA teams are biggest challenge for OKC Thunder to win West in 2024-25 season?

What Presti was getting at is that it’s tougher than ever to assemble a talented group of egos, keep them all happy and breed them to be successful. To be NBA champions. Too many things pull at them from every direction.

The way he’s gone about it this time around is selecting a certain mold of person, a certain type of character. And the underlying understanding is that these guys either come equipped with or come ready to absorb an appreciation for winning. Anyone who was a member of the Thunder in the couple seasons leading up to last year has that.

The guys who joined up this summer either understand winning (see Alex Caruso’s championship ring) or have the desire for it.

Presti, now a couple contending teams in, knows his role in all of it. Give them the tools, position the pieces best, give them both an on-court and off-court leader that can corral the egos and accentuate the best traits, and just think differently.

Don’t shorten the rotation just because that’s where everyone else is when they win, don’t resort to a playstyle because it’s the one that lifted another team from the middle to contention. Hire unconventional thinkers from unconventional places, and come up with thoughts that sound crazy or elicit debate because no one else has them.

Those are the evergreen traits that Presti developed as he grew with the Thunder. Anything else is probably subject to be cycled yearly, monthly and perhaps even on a whim.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: What lessons has Thunder, Sam Presti taken from Durant-Westbrook era?