At home Friday night, the Oklahoma City Thunder were leading the underwhelming Brooklyn Nets, 53-49, at halftime. In any other season, a victory would have been all but certain, but in this season of rapidly diminishing expectations for Oklahoma City, the Thunder slowly let the game go Brooklyn’s way.

In the closing seconds, with the Thunder down by 2, Reggie Jackson — one of the few recognizable Thunder players to avoid injury of late — missed a 3-pointer that could have won the game. Instead, Oklahoma City lost and fell to 3-11, the worst mark in the Western Conference. And with every game that the injured Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook miss, it becomes more questionable if the Thunder, a perennial contender, can be righted.

Both stars were expected to participate in noncontact practices Saturday, but neither is expected to play before early December. As Derrick Rose and a host of other players can attest, returning from a serious injury is not always amenable to a schedule.

The Thunder’s poor start inspired Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, to wonder if the team should consider having Durant and Westbrook sit out the rest of the season. Such a move would ensure their recovery and could help build the franchise through the high draft pick a bad record would garner. Since making the playoffs in the West will probably require 50 wins or more, this season could be lost already regardless of whether Durant and Westbrook return.

“The question I don’t think anybody has asked is why don’t they pull a David Robinson and try to get Tim Duncan?” Cuban said before the Mavericks played Miami on Nov. 9.

Cuban was referring to the 1996-97 season, when the Spurs, coming off a two-season stretch in which the team won a combined 121 games, were forced to spend most of the season without David Robinson, the team’s All-Star center. Robinson missed the first month of the season with a back injury, and six games into his return, he broke his foot and missed the rest of the season. With Sean Elliott also sitting out much of the time, the Spurs finished 20-62.

Intentional or not, the Spurs’ lost season created a dynasty. After a 3-15 start, coach Bob Hill was fired. San Antonio general manager Gregg Popovich, whose only experience as a head coach had been at NCAA Division III Pomona-Pitzer, decided to name himself as Hill’s replacement. Popovich did not do much better than Hill, going 17-47, but that was just bad enough to help the team win the draft lottery. Popovich used the top pick of the 1997 draft on Duncan, a quiet power forward from Wake Forest.

Five championships later, Popovich and Duncan are among the best pairings of coach and player in NBA history, and the team’s initial success can be largely attributed to Robinson’s losing a season of his prime and the team’s making little effort to compete in his absence.

Repeating that situation, however, is hardly guaranteed. Philadelphia is seemingly openly tanking for a second season. Despite the high draft picks the 76ers have acquired, it is hard to see them turning around soon, considering that just two of their players are managing a league-average player efficiency rating.

Philadelphia’s hopes for an eventual resurgence are based on the notion that Nerlens Noel and Joel Embiid could be a formidable frontcourt combination, as Robinson and Duncan were in the early days of the Spurs dynasty. But Noel, the No. 6 pick in the 2013 draft, sat out his rookie season while recovering from knee surgery and has yet to refine his game to NBA standards on a consistent basis. Embiid, the No. 3 pick this year, is recovering from off-season foot surgery and has yet to play. By the time both are healthy and ready to compete, their rookie contracts could almost be over.

But those hapless Spurs of old, at least on the surface, are more similar to this season’s Thunder than to the 76ers. It is not that the current Thunder roster lacks the talent to win, it is that the talent has been neutralized by injuries. If a lost season resulted in the addition to the roster of a game-changing player, the results could take the team from perennial contender to overwhelming title favorite.

But while Cuban was not wrong to raise the idea, the Thunder may want to think twice before basing a strategy on drafting a player like Duncan. There have been a lot of top draft picks acquired by struggling teams over the years, but there has only been one Duncan.