Heavy is the head that wears the regular-season crown. With success comes exposure. With exposure comes eyes—eyes that see both what you are and what you aren’t, eyes that have the power to expand your best qualities into myth and reduce your worst into a brand or meme.
Amid the Oklahoma City Thunder’s startling rise to the top of the NBA’s pecking order in only two years’ time, the peculiarities of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s style of play have become a mainstream point of contention. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—and the thunderous “MVP” chants for SGA, who will reportedly win his first Michael Jordan Trophy later today, have been met with “free throw merchant” accusations that grow louder as Oklahoma City heads deeper into its championship pursuit.
“It’s hard to [win] with the calls that Shai gets,” Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards said after a January regular-season clash against Gilgeous-Alexander last year. “It’s hard to shut him down. You can’t touch him at any time of the game, so it’s super hard to beat. That team is a good team, especially when they get calls like that.”
Sixteen months later, not much has changed—though there’s far less left to be said. “Yeah, there was a lot of frustration out there,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said with the resignation of a man tired of talking about the weather after his team got thumped in Tuesday’s Western Conference finals opener. “But we talked about [the foul calls] before the series started, and we have to be able to put that to the side and get on with the next-play mentality.”
The complaints are understandable, even warranted at times. But as with most things that get whittled down to a tagline, they fail to address the how and the why. And in Shai’s case, those questions are the most interesting aspects of his style. We aren’t talking about a scourge on the league; we’re talking about a savant who is forcing us to see the game from a different angle—literally.
Not even four minutes into Game 1, Minnesota had already racked up four team fouls. What got it into the penalty? A loping, left-handed Gilgeous-Alexander drive, with SGA both sharply tightening his turn radius in the paint and decelerating to a dead stop at the same time, forcing contact from Jaden McDaniels in a congested lane. The whistle blew. Shai crashed to the floor. He tucked his hands behind his head—as either a show of early fatigue after a Game 7 played just two days earlier or a show of comfort in his domain. Step into my office. Whatever it was, Ant wasn’t here for it. Edwards flippantly tossed the ball in SGA’s direction as he lay on the court, grazing Shai’s knee. Technical foul. Another free throw for Shai—and he didn’t even have to work for it.
Gilgeous-Alexander finished Game 1 going 11-for-14 from the line, the most free throws he’s taken in the postseason so far and just seven fewer than the entire Wolves team took on Tuesday night. He was behind only Giannis Antetokounmpo for most free throw attempts during the regular season. In some ways, the outrage is a mark of begrudging respect veiled as moralistic contempt. Calls of foul baiting persisted throughout James Harden’s prime. It was one of the biggest story lines of the 2006 NBA Finals, wherein Dwyane Wade attempted an astounding 97 free throws in six games. Gilgeous-Alexander is simply the latest avatar.
For a vocal majority of fans, SGA’s antics have been antithetical to the renewed state of physicality in postseason basketball. He bends and writhes and falls down a ton. He is seemingly afforded an almost mystical whistle, drawing fouls with impunity. Chants of “free throw merchant” will invariably rain down in the Target Center when the Western Conference finals shift to Minneapolis for Game 3 on Saturday.
Whether the label holds truth or not is almost immaterial. It has become the basis of Shai’s leaguewide perception. He’s been deemed a foul baiter. A scammer. An unethical hooper. What isn’t often said, but is no less true, is how effectively Shai can change the game by manipulating the floor with the slightest movement and instilling crises of confidence in the defense. This series has been billed as a matchup between the defining shooting guards of this new era. And the first blow was delivered by the one who turned the game upside down by virtue of his spellbinding athleticism—just not in the way we’ve been conditioned to appreciate.
I’ve thought an awful lot about the beguiling ways in which Gilgeous-Alexander moves. It was a central motif in a long feature I wrote about him last season. There are players who operate in different time signatures, but that isn’t the true core of SGA’s unique talent. He plays basketball on a tilted plane. That is his ultimate athletic gift: the balance he maintains on the edge of collapse, every single possession. Looking out of control, but in reality gripping the wheel tightly. It’s easy to deride what isn’t so readily apparent.
“I think historically, we've had a pretty narrow definition of what it means to be a good athlete,” said Eric Leidersdorf, the president and head of research and development of P3, a sports science lab with a lengthy partnership with the NBA. “The Giannises, the Ant Edwardses, the Zions of the world, they're always going to stand out. Guys who trade on just incredible accelerative ability, the ability to push against the ground and go. Highlights are always going to be there. They're going to be the easiest ones to spot, in many respects. The guys like Shai, guys like Harden—in many respects, guys like Luka as well—these incredibly skilled, effective athletes have their own set of tools that they tend to leverage. The best are able to find ways to put their best tools against your worst ones and take advantage of that more often than not. And I think Shai falls into that category.”
P3 has assessed more than 1,000 NBA players over the past decade-plus, but it’s never tested Gilgeous-Alexander. Still, just from the eye test, SGA possesses outlier levels of flexibility and decelerative force for his size—the players in P3’s database who would be most similar in both ankle flexibility and braking ability are typically around 6 feet tall. Shai is 6-foot-6. “Everyone kind of bumps and steps back in some reality, but Shai’s a master of it,” Steve Nash told me last year. “Of knowing what's an offensive foul, what's not enough of a bump. It's almost like a gradual thing. I've made contact, I can push, that's enough. His momentum's going back, I haven't overdone it. Now I can step back.”
That lower-body malleability allows him to move in curvilinear patterns that feel more akin to the movements of an ice skater than a basketball player. At his size, the degree to which he can angle his lower extremities to be nearly parallel to the floor while still maintaining his dribble is unprecedented. Basketball is a game of space, but it is also a game of angles. Gilgeous-Alexander’s body can access angles no other player can at his size. And as he rides that edge, he often leaves himself in precarious positions, heavily influenced by contact. Stability and maneuverability are on opposite ends of a spectrum; you can’t increase one without losing at least a portion of the other. That goes for cars and aircraft. It goes for athletes, too. “Shai adopts the mechanics of a tennis slide to decelerate, angling his shin and ankle such that he can use the side of his foot as a brake system,” I wrote last year. “But while tennis players have ample room to come to a stop, SGA controls the timing of his slide amid contact and spatial constraints to the degree that he’s able to seamlessly pop back into shooting position.” It’s the skeleton key of his entire game.
This isn’t meant to be an ironclad defense against the foul merchant accusations. To say that Shai exaggerates contact is fundamentally true—moving in the precarious ways he does inherently leaves the body prone to collision. Of course contact would affect his trajectory more than it would for someone who moves in a more standard fashion. But there are undoubtedly moments of Shai’s unnatural movement that are more preemptive than reactionary, especially in midair, as he attempts to draw contact that he braces for most times down the court. It’s awkward and only goes to put more of a damper on his reputation. But what I’m trying to suggest here is that SGA’s foul-drawing ability relies on more skill and athletic prowess than it often seems to. Against an intimidating defense like Minnesota’s, which weaponizes length and physicality, Gilgeous-Alexander’s ability to keep McDaniels (who had defended him as well as anyone has in these playoffs) on his toes and eventually foul him out is simply part of the chess match.
NBA officiating is, for better and worse, an interpretive art, and there will always be forces that push referees’ vision and judgment past their respective capacities—Victor Wembanyama’s absurd length and dexterity being one example. Shai’s unique economy of motion, in conjunction with his ability to stop on a dime, can form strange sight lines. Optical illusions, even. But this is what great athletes do, isn’t it? Great feats of athleticism command double takes; they blur lines of reality and imagination. Just because Shai’s athleticism doesn’t capture the classic ideal of Michael Jordan the way Ant’s does doesn’t make it any less valid in this ever-evolving game.
I’ve asserted in the past that if Ant is MJ’s latest acolyte, SGA’s best athletic comparison is Novak Djokovic—another eerily flexible athletic genius who draws ire because of how psychologically taxing it is to combat his style of play.
If there was one visual to take away from Game 1, it happened with roughly seven minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Julius Randle, muscling his way through the brick wall that is Lu Dort, fights his way into the paint before Dort pulls the chair on him. As Randle stumbles to the floor, the ball is quickly hot potatoed to Gilgeous-Alexander in transition. SGA turns a sharp corner on McDaniels, with McDaniels struggling to keep from getting onto Shai’s back. Shai’s right leg strikes the ground at a curious 40-degree angle before he contorts his body into a sort of concave shell as his legs churn. There is marginal contact from McDaniels—a hand on Shai’s back and some entanglement in the lower body. Shai collapses onto the floor, but not before releasing a literal fallaway as he slides into the baseline. The shot bounces in. And-1. Incredible shot, incredible balance.
True to Shai and all he’s come to embody amid this irrepressible MVP-worthy campaign, whether or not there was a foul, there was one in the eye of the beholder. But you can’t say he didn’t work for it.
Shai has pushed his body’s flexibility to its very limits to play a style truly his own. How the players, the officials, and the league at large adjust to him isn’t his business, really. “That’s kind of what Shai does,” Nash said. “He manipulates people. He is able to put you in a position to take the bait, and then he exploits you.”
