Flyquan Thornton

OKC Thunder #chiefskingdom broncos biggest hater

[fixthebaseballs @sports4casuals]

Been so impressed with Wemby at age 22 in his first postseason run, quick little highlight tape of his best plays 🔥🔥🔥🔥

[𝒦ℰ𝒩𝒩ℰ𝒯ℋ 𝒲𝒜ℒ𝒦ℰℛ ℐℐℐ🤍 @Kenneth_Walker9]

𝒪𝓃ℯ 𝒹𝒶𝓎 𝒶𝓉 𝒶 𝓉𝒾𝓂ℯ

[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.

[Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente]

Why isn’t Game 3 of NBA finals today? Seems like a miss. There should always be Finals game on Sundays in my humble but almost always correct opinion

[Andrew Schlecht @AndrewKSchlecht]

Imagine the Knicks having to play the Spurs without KAT and Bridges..... That's what the Thunder had to do. Would make the Spurs look a lot better.

[ClutchPoints @ClutchPoints]

Browns GM Andrew Berry consulted the Myles Garrett blockbuster trade with Thunder executive Sam Presti, per @AlbertBreer.

“Presti affirmed Berry’s resolve to prioritize getting a player and not just picks, taking him through the Paul George trade of 2019. Most folks on the outside focused on the four first-round picks and two additional first-round pick swaps Presti landed in the deal. But the reality was that OKC viewed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a player they were higher on than most, as the key. SGA has since won two MVPs and was the best player on a title team.”

(via @SInow, https://t.co/tOPOWdDWCc)

[Sam @Bl0cknesMonster]

just realized Shai took down our biggest opp last year and now we’re gonna take down his biggest opp this year. that’s love

[Finals J Dub @FinalsJDub]

Wemby, and I can’t stress this enough, isn’t American

[AB @DaktoJdub]

The spurs have hurt Jdub, Ajay Mitchell, Brunson, etc. But Haliburton gets hurt on a non contact play and the nba world goes crazy for going on a year now

[Fouled City @Linebackerdort]

I have never seen a team go from the most loved to the most hated in the span of 4 days😭😭 spurs are getting exposed

[Jaylenbrownfan @SarksDaddy]

Dawg they turning my guy Chet into the JJ McCarthy meme 😭😭😭😭

[Bouddi @BouddiDidIt]

@KnicksMuse Clearly nobody watched WCF it’s just how he plays and now everyone gets to see it

[🗽🍻 @Light_2610]

Thank you Mahomes

[🎽 @ringsssss_]

Stephon Castle plays basketball like Isiah Pacheco

[Finals J Dub @FinalsJDub]

Not so funny now, is it?

[Smiley @30GotNext]

OMG THE WORLD SEEING IT LMAO

[Russ' TD ⚡ @RussFcb]

It should have been us

[Pranav Sriraman @PranavSriraman]

Wow the 15th straight fake champion in NBA history

[dewby⚡️ @mountaindewbyok]

i unironically think this would help immensely with his confidence

[Flyquan Thornton @Dylan1477]

@WillBeatsBooks @DynastyDadFF Loveland Williams side bette