Leo Graber

[Leo Graber @lgrab13]

@Three_Cone

[Adam Schefter @AdamSchefter]

With 17 days until the flight that will take the 49ers to Australia, tight end George Kittle still maintains hope that he'll be ready to board that airplane and play in the regular season opener against the Rams on Sept. 10.

Story via @nwagoner:

https://t.co/p3RfqUkcS3

[Cooper Jones @CooperJNBA]

Mike Brown says he was constantly asking Dillon Jones for advice throughout the Knicks’ run because Dillon had just won a title with OKC:

“Hey when you guys were in this position, what was Mark saying? What was Sam Presti saying?”

(via @Roommates__Show)

[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.

[Kevin O'Connor @KevinOConnor]

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was sensational tonight. His development as a playmaker from year to year has been amazing. 33 assists to 7 turnovers in the series and I think even that stat undersells how he's in total command out there.

[Milton Chavis @mdwbasketball]

When real basketball players speak, listen up!!!! Internet full of horrible basketball takes. Thank GOD the players are in the media now.

[Carson Breber @Carsobi]

I don’t know how anyone could still think Jokic is the *clear* best in the world. Shai is at one of the highest peaks we’ve ever seen, having a Mt. Rushmore scoring season. He’s outplayed Jokic H2H more often than not the last two years. He’s gonna very deservedly win B2B MVPs.

[Rob Perez @WorldWideWob]

This is the shit the Hamptons 5 Warriors did to teams every day ending in Y.

You go to the bathroom during the commercial, feeling good about your double-digit lead, maybe send a peacocking text or two to the group chat, and when you get back to the couch this is the score.

[S. Dolan @SteveThunderfan]

Sometimes I just think about how OKC won the championship on like a C, C- Playoff run lol

[Sports Fan 405 @405Fan]

The crazy thing about the OKC playoff run is how awful they shot the ball from 3 and they still managed to win.

Shai - 28.1% -9.4%
Jdub - 30.4% -6.1%
Chet - 29.7% -8.2%
Dort - 34.3% -6.9%

Okc shot 37.4% from 3 in the reg season and 33.8% in the playoffs. 37.4% was

[OKC THUNDER @okcthunder]

A legendary speech from @Aaron_Wiggins_ 🗣️

[rylee @thunderfanrylee]

How it started vs how it’s going

[Trent Attyah @BookitWithTrent]

I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with 9 followers on twitter doing OKC pre/post game blogs with Norris Cole and Alex Abrines in the starting lineup wondering how tf this team will ever win after KD left.

Tonight i’m courtside for Game 7 of the NBA Finals making content for my +300k followers and cheering for the only team I give a shit about. This is a full circle moment and I couldn’t be more grateful.⚡️⛈️💙

[StatMuse @statmuse]

Alex Caruso is averaging the most SPG (2.8) ever by a player off the bench in a Finals.

[Sopranos World @SopranosWorld]

“Whatever happened to Alex Caruso, the strong silent type, now that was a defender”

[ELLE! @2HAIGILGEOUS]

four more

[Isaiah Roby @roby_isaiah]

Man I'm Happy for OKC making the Finals fr…great team and organization, they deserve it!
The growth has been amazing to watch...Can we retire the 2022 end of year starting lineup pic now? 😂 stop tagging me

[Royce Young @royceyoung]

Here are all 13 of SGA's buckets from Game 4 -- a showcase of insane skill and shotmaking, beautiful basketball from all areas of the floor.

He took a total of SIX free throws before the Wolves started intentionally fouling, and there are people, including a lot of media, fixated on the SIX free throws, and not the masterpiece SGA painted.

It's weird.

[Leo Graber @lgrab13]

@okcthunder

[OKC THUNDER @okcthunder]

Thunder fans, this is your chance to win one of these team-signed jerseys right in time for the Playoffs! 🎉

Here's how to enter:

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