The Oklahoma City Thunder silenced their doubters with a rout against Denver in Game 7

The Oklahoma City Thunder showed that they're no fluke. 

With a trip to the Western Conference Finals on the line in a winner-takes-all Game 7 that pitted the top two MVP contenders against one another in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokic, the Thunder proved that their NBA-best record and their top-rated defense weren't successes confined to the regular season. 

The youngest team in the postseason not only stood up to a Denver Nuggets team that had won a championship two years ago and routed the LA Clippers in a Game 7 in the first round of these playoffs, they annihilated them. 

After the Nuggets jumped to an 11-point lead in the first quarter, the Thunder responded by outscoring them in the second period, 39-20, and led by as many as 43 points in the fourth quarter. 

It was a stunning win for a team that seemed great, but wasn't really battle-tested. Last season, the Thunder also finished with the No. 1 record in the Western Conference, but fell apart against the Dallas Mavericks in the second round of the playoffs. 

This was their chance to prove that they had real postseason chops.

The Thunder emphatically answered any questions about whether they were ready for this stage. They transformed a battle-tested Nuggets team with a superstar who is widely considered the greatest player in the world into a ragtag group that looked deflated and stunned apart from the first quarter. 

While Shai Gilgeous-Alexander led the Thunder's offensive charge with 35 points, Alex Caruso was the head of the snake on the other end of the court. The 6-foot-5, former undrafted player almost single-handedly unraveled the Nuggets' offense at times, robbing them of their confidence. 

Caruso, a former NBA champion whom the Thunder