Henry Berry

OU Student I Journalism Student I
#BoomerSooner | Romans 8:31-39

[Henry Berry @HenryBerryOU]

The goat!! 🐐

[Eric Bailey @EricBaileyTW]

The unsung hero for #Sooners fans: @patrickjdunn_

He was the communications director for OU Softball for Patty Gasso.

He's now the communications director for OU Baseball.

He's a great guy. One of my all-time favorites to work with during my journalism career.

[Oklahoma Baseball @OU_Baseball]

SOONERS TO THE SEMIS 🗣️

[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.

[Joel Lorenzi @JoelXLorenzi]

Shai on how much input he'll offer on the Thunder's offseason moves: "I will have zero input. I will let Sam Presti, the greatest GM ever, do his job."

[ESPN Insights @ESPNInsights]

The Spurs are the second team this century to start a playoff game on a 15-0 run or better and lose 😬

They join the 2017 Wizards, who blew a 16-0 lead in the East semis at Boston.

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

“You people at home and TV talking about they were physical with Wemby, man y’all need to stop it. I’ve been kissed harder…For you people thinking that’s physicality, y’all need to shut the hell up.”

— Charles Barkley. 🤣💀

(h/t @NBA__Courtside)

[Shams Charania @ShamsCharania]

Breaking: Oklahoma City Thunder's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has won his second consecutive NBA Most Valuable Player award, becoming the 14th player in league history to win back-to-back MVPs, multiple sources tell ESPN.

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

Swept in his 20s
Swept in his 30s
Swept in his 40s

Witnessed Greatness

[Oklahoma Sooners @OU_Athletics]

Experience and Excellence 😤

Fuzzy Benas is the Male Senior of the Year!

#SoonerSportsAwards

[Oklahoma Men's Gym @OU_MGymnastics]

Couldn’t be prouder of this team for an incredible season.

Conference champions, undefeated regular season and finished as national runners-up for the first time since 2022.

» https://t.co/YSdCAfWl7d
#BoomerSooner☝️

[Tyler Neal @T_Neal]

One of my absolute favorite Sooners

Why does the flip shot at 0:38 kill me 🤣

[Henry Berry @HenryBerryOU]

#GYMU

[Oklahoma Men's Gym @OU_MGymnastics]

MPSF CHAMPIONS 🏆

#BoomerSooner | #GymU

[Oklahoma Men's Gym @OU_MGymnastics]

MPSF CHAMPIONS 🏆

#BoomerSooner | #GymU

[Planet of Gymnastics @planetofgym]

Yes, you saw that right… there’s a whole other half of the tour from yesterday 🤯 The OU men’s team shares some spaces with the women but they have a separate side of the building with their own training room, hot/cold tubs, etc — they even enter the gym from a separate door!

[amar 💍🥷✌️ @okcamars]

2-WAY CHET!

Thunder up 8 on Denver in the 3rd quarter on Sunday Night Basketball

📺 NBC & Peacock

[Oklahoma Sooners @OU_Athletics]

6️⃣ chances to get out of the house and cheer on the Sooners this week‼️

[VOLNUGS @VOLNUGS]

We are going to blow this open soon FYI

[Henry Berry @HenryBerryOU]

Thankful for the opportunity to create this story!

[Oklahoma Football @OU_Football]

❝I want to be known as a guy who, when he's out there, he's giving 100%❞ - @officialfeb_54

Game Program Feature » https://t.co/iPlE36p6KR

[𝙖𝙧𝙠𝙖𝙖 @arkaavs]

I hope Shai averages 15 free throws a game this season I love seeing the tears on the timeline 🤣🤣