During an end-of-season press conference on Monday, Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti addressed criticism of star player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander head-on — and did not hold back.
In a scathing defense of Gilgeous-Alexander, Presti spoke for nearly seven minutes straight about how the reigning league MVP doesn’t deserve any of the criticism he is given. The GM made a point to note how Gilgeous-Alexander does not fit into the stereotypes about NBA players in the modern era, but he has become the latest target of the “machine” of criticism aimed at players.
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“We’ve got a litany of things that 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,” he said towards the conclusion of that rant.
Gilgeous-Alexander has been criticized all season for falling after making a shot, which some consider a form of flopping or foul-baiting. It’s been an opinion shared by multiple players, including Boston Celtics’ Jaylen Brown and San Antonio Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, during post-game press conferences. In December, Wembanyama went as far as to call his own version of the game “pure and ethical basketball”; as a result, “ethical basketball” as a term has become a rallying cry for critics of Gilgeous-Alexander’s penchant for drawing fouls.
Presti opened his defense on Monday by addressing this narrative, and the players who have helped disperse it.
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“The post-game press conference has turned into the bully pulpit to create competitive advantage,” Presti said. “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.”
Presti said that he doesn’t “fault” players who do that, because “they may think it works” to give themselves a competitive advantage. But that “narrative” against Gilgeous-Alexander, he added, created additional obstacles for the two-time league MVP.
“He’s playing against six people. He’s got five defenders, and the sixth defender is social media,” Presti said. “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.”
Presti then went even further, breaking down some of the things that NBA players are criticized for and noting how Gilgeous-Alexander is counter to that. Narratives he mentioned included criticisms of NBA players not playing defense, being “totally inaccessible,” in Presti’s words, and solely making three-pointers.
One by one, Presti dispelled that idea that Gilgeous-Alexander could be criticized by any of those things: “Shai’s a two-end player,” he said of the defense argument, before speaking on the three-pointers.
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“He’s brought the mid-range back to an art form,” Presti said. “He’s not a guy that’s just launching 3s. So we can check that off the box.”
Other debates he mentioned included the narrative of players complaining to referees, and the ongoing discussion about players skipping games under the guise of “load management.”
“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,” Presti said, before pointing to Gilgeous-Alexander’s record. “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,” Presti continued. “He plays every night. His consistency is well documented. So you can’t get him on that.”
Central to Presti’s ramble was the question of fouls, and the idea that Gilgeous-Alexander was unfairly drawing them.
“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,” Presti said.
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(As Yahoo Sports’ Tom Haberstroh noted during the Western Conference Finals: falling works.)
Presti added that Gilgeous-Alexander is tied with Joel Embiid at eighth for fouls drawn this season. “But I understand, if you listen to the narrative, you’d think he’s 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5,” Presti said with a laugh. “He drew a lot more fouls before we got much better, and when we got better, obviously people pay more attention to him.
“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?” he continued.
For what it’s worth, Gilgeous-Alexander sits in 8th for fouls drawn per game, but sixth for total personal foul drawn. But the question of his fouls has become a touchpoint on social media, to an absurd degree. (At the end of May, Gilgeous-Alexander’s lawyers had to send a cease-and-desist to Underdog Sports for trying to sell a board game called “Unethical Hoops,” featuring a character that looked a bit too much like the Thunder guard.)
Presti said that much of this circles back to social media, where opinions drive the way fans perceive the game — creating that sixth defender.
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“This is the world we live in today. There’s a lot of financial incentive to create these things, career ambitions, like I said before,” Presti said. “The best thing we can do when those things happen is stay above it.”