Aaron

OKC Thunder 2025 Champions😎

[Thunder Film Room @ThunderFilmRoom]

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will play for team Canada in their World Cup qualifiers on July 3rd vs. Puerto Rico & July 6th vs. Jamaica.

Getting to watch some Shai hoops soon will be nice.

[L @JAM3SMADDISON]

are we forgetting smth ?

[Pranav Sriraman @PranavSriraman]

Game 4 down 2-1 in the Finals. Where legends are made.

Someone once said, “Some people are built for this moment and some aren’t.”

[rio 🇧🇷 🇫🇷 🇵🇹 @pilgeousx]

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander - Top 100 most Influential People in Sports 2026

[SleeperThunder @SleeperThunder]

TIME Magazine has named Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to its inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in sports.

“Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the 2024-2025 regular-season and NBA Finals MVP from the Oklahoma City Thunder, somehow upped his game this season. The unstoppable guard, a four-time All-Star and four-time first-team All-NBA honoree, turned in his most efficient season yet, shooting shot 55% from the field, averaging a career-best 6.6 assists per game, and leading the NBA in free throws made per game (7.9), as Oklahoma City again finished with the league’s best record. The Canadian’s shiftiness and ability to stop on a dime for pull-up jumpers and step-backs helped him frustrate opponents and secure his second straight MVP award.”

#ThunderUp

[pissboi @PizzafaceJake]

All timer community note lol

[Jason Gallagher @jga41agher]

The more I watch the Spurs the more insane it is how everyone lost their minds over the Thunder.

[Underdog NBA @UnderdogNBA]

Sam Presti on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander:

"He's playing against six people. He's got five defenders and the sixth is social media."

(via @Rylan_Stiles)

[Brandon Rahbar @BrandonRahbar]

Sam Presti’s full answer on the SGA free throw narrative is well worth your time reading. ⬇️

[Clemente Almanza @CAlmanza1007]

Probably the best moment from what Sam Presti said today. Went scorched earth on all of the SGA narratives that have been bubbling up over the years:

Of all the things that I've talked to Shai about, this is actually one I've never talked to him about. He's probably going to kill me for talking about this, truthfully.

First of all, let me just start with the opposing coaches for one second. The post-game press conference has turned into the bully pulpit to create competitive advantage. I mean, we know what that is. It used to be you'd get up there, you'd talk about your own team. Now everyone gets up there and they talk about the officials and they discredit the other team. Again, like they're great competitors, so we know why that's happening, and I don't fault them because I think they may think it works.

So the question is why are they continuing to do it? Because there's financial incentives not to do it. But everyone's competing. Let's also recognize that it's the bully pulpit for competitive advantage, and that's what it's kind of turned into, which is part of competing. We all get that.

Relative to Shai and the narrative on that, he's playing against six people. He's got five defenders, and the sixth defender is social media. That's a reality. He's not going to be the last player that the machine decides to target, but no one's going to handle it as gracefully because, when they turn it on somebody else, they're not going to step up there every night and not acknowledge it.

A couple things more just on the whole topic. We think all the time or we hear all the time about things that people don't like about the NBA, which are inaccurate, but they're narratives that exist on the alternate reality.

One, players don't play defense. Shai's a two-end player. Now, he plays with four or five All-NBA defensive players, so sometimes his defensive ability gets undersold, but he plays two ends.

Second, all NBA players do is complain, bitch and moan and try to intimidate the officials with bad behavior in the games to give foul calls. He's gotten three technical fouls this year. None for complaining. One for waving a towel in support of someone that hit a shot that doesn't play very often. Okay. So he's not doing that.

The other thing is load management. Nobody plays. They take all these games off. Shai plays every night. He missed a bunch of games this year for an oblique strain, and we might give him a night off two or three times a year, maybe. But he plays back-to-backs. He plays heavy minutes. He plays against good teams. He plays against teams that are bad teams. He plays every night. His consistency is well documented. So you can't get him on that.

The next one is all you do is shoot 3s. NBA players, all they do is shoot 3s. Okay. Well, he's brought the mid-range back to an art form. He's transcendent for any generation, any player. That's why like older players love his game.

It's also one of the reasons he gets fouled a lot. Because he plays in the mid-range because we don't call the landing space fouls in the mid-range the way we do at the 3-point line, right, because he's avoiding that oftentimes because there's too many bodies in there. With the 3-point shot, you can see it easily, and I think a lot of times he's trying to avoid that. So he's not a guy that's just launching 3s. So we can check that off the box.

The other one is like these guys are just totally inaccessible. They're in their own world. Well, the guy signs 400 autographs before every game. Before the Western Conference Finals Game 7, he's signing autographs.

So we've got a litany of things that generally the narrative is about NBA players that they do wrong. Well, based on those narratives, I don't agree with them, but he would be doing them right. And he doesn't really complain about any of it. So if we're just talking about trying to draw fouls, well, every other great player in the NBA, that's part of the game is drawing fouls.

He drew 415 fouls this year; 11 were challenged. 11. Four of those were overturned. So that's like 2 1/2 percent of the foul calls were actually challenged. Again, that's part of the bully pulpit part of this thing, which I get and it's part of competing.

As far as those fouls, I think in the fouls drawn -- I had this written down here -- he's tied with Embiid for 8 and 9 in terms of number of fouls drawn in the season. 6 and 7 are Jaylen Brown and Wembanyama. So that's kind of the group of players that he's in.

But I understand, if you listen to the narrative, you'd think he's 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. He drew a lot more fouls before we got much better, and when we got better, obviously people pay much more attention to him.

We'll have to see where that goes, you know what I mean? We don't know. He'll never say anything about it. And the only thing I'm pointing out is I don't think he's being unfairly handled, I just think, instead of talking about something that we are looking to find as a negative, can we please also acknowledge that he also does a lot of positive things for the game, most of which are the things that people are very unhappy -- not unhappy, but they don't like on social media. And I know that a lot of us live on social media. I would think they would love him for that reason.

This is like the world we live in today. There's a lot of financial incentive to create these things, career ambitions, like I said before. The best thing we can do when those things happen is stay above it.

Now I'm pointing it out now at the end of the season, but we're going to have to stay above it because it's probably not going to change. But he does a lot of good things too.

[NBACentral @TheDunkCentral]

Sam Presti says SGA doesn’t seek foul calls with poor behavior

“All NBA players do is complain, bitch and moan and try to intimidate the officials with bad behavior in the games to give foul calls. He's gotten three technical fouls this year. None for complaining. One for waving a towel in support of someone that hit a shot that doesn't play very often. Okay. So he's not doing that.”

(Via @CAlmanza1007 )

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

Thunder GM Sam Presti on criticism towards SGA:

"He's playing against 6 people. He's got 5 defenders and the 6th defender is social media."

(via @okcthunder)

[ClutchPoints @ClutchPoints]

"You didn't hear us complaining. We're not complaining. We just want to know what the rules are, and we'll play by those."

Thunder GM Sam Presti on the physicality of the playoffs 🗣

(via @AlexRoig_NBA)

[NBACentral @TheDunkCentral]

Sam Presti just fired back at SGA critics with some eye-opening numbers:

He drew 415 fouls this season.
Only 11 were challenged.
Only 4 were overturned.

(Via @BrandonRahbar )

[Rylan Stiles @Rylan_Stiles]

Sam Presti on SGA bucking what NBA fans say they hate: He plays both ends of the floor, never complains and moans “he has three technical fouls, none for complaining he got one for waving a towel in support of a teammate” said he “plays every night so you can’t get him on that” and the next one is he has brought the mid range back to an art form so he isn’t a guy that is just launching 3s. Then the other one is these guys are totally inaccessible, well the guy signs 400 autographs before every game. Based on those narratives, he would be doing them right. So if we are just talking about trying to draw fouls, well every other great player tries to draw fouls. And only 2.5% of those fouls were challenged. 4 of them were overturned.

[Clemente Almanza @CAlmanza1007]

Sam Presti: “We have 15 players under contract that we really, really like.”

[Thunder Film Room @ThunderFilmRoom]

The 🐐 has arrived.

[OKC THUNDER @okcthunder]

❝I do think this team has a lot more layers it can access. It has intangibles and trust. It has brain power and brass. And as constituted, it is a tremendous ambassador for our community and state.❞

- Executive VP and GM, Sam Presti

[Brandon Rahbar @BrandonRahbar]

Sam Presti on Chet Holmgren: "Chet's one of our guys. He's been impactful. He drives winning for us on so many levels."

Presti says a big reason why OKC got to the WCF was due to Chet.

"He didn't have a great series in the last series. But if you go back and look at some of the greatest players in the game, they run into defeat and struggle... that's what makes them great players."

"This is a guy that is intrinsically motivated."

"I'm confident that he'll be ready to go."

[Brandon Rahbar @BrandonRahbar]

Sam Presti with a crazy stat:

OKC's Big 3 of SGA, JDub and Chet have played 40% of their possible games together.