Thunder lead exec pushes back on narratives surrounding Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

Oklahoma City Thunder lead executive Sam Presti said he’s never talked to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander about the internet’s relationship with his drawing fouls, and that the back-to-back NBA MVP would “kill me for talking about this,” but Presti needed to say his piece.

In a near-seven-minute tangent during Presti’s annual end-of-season availability, which ran almost two hours, Presti addressed the discourse surrounding SGA’s proclivity to draw fouls — a subject that swelled this season between opposing coaches and players to fans and pundits.

“He’s playing against six people,” Presti said Monday. “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.”

This past season, several coaches vocalized their frustrations with the way Gilgeous-Alexander is officiated, including New York’s Mike Brown, Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff, Golden State’s Steve Kerr and Minnesota’s Chris Finch. Their comments ranged from taking exception to the application of rules and discrepancies in how SGA is officiated relative to other players, all the way to the physicality teams are allowed to defend him and the frequency they feel he flops.

Presti noted that postgame news conferences had “turned into the bully pulpit to create competitive advantage.”

“We know what that is,” Presti added. “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.”

As a point to derail from the discourse, instead of hoping to credit Gilgeous-Alexander on the season he had and the career he’s built, Presti cited the critical narratives he feels surround the league’s product and how Gilgeous-Alexander contradicts them.

Among those narratives, he noted claims that “all NBA players do is complain, b—- and moan and try to intimidate the officials with bad behavior in the games to give foul calls. (SGA has) gotten three technical fouls this year, none for complaining.”

He also cited load management — such a controversial topic of the past decade that it spawned the now-contentious 65-game rule.

“Nobody plays. They take all these games off. Shai plays every night,” Presti said. “He plays back-to-backs. He plays heavy minutes. He plays against good teams. He plays against teams that are bad. He plays every night. His consistency is well documented. So, you can’t get him on that.”

As he continued, Presti noted the issue fans have taken with the increasing 3-point rate among teams and the idea that it’s damaged the product.

“The next one is, ‘All you do is shoot 3s. NBA players, all they do is shoot 3s.’ OK. Well, he’s brought the midrange back to an art form,” Presti said of SGA. “He’s transcendent for any generation, any player. That’s why older players love his game.”

Eventually, he circled back to the fouls. It always comes back to the whistle.

“He drew 415 fouls this year; 11 were challenged,” Presti said. “Four of those were overturned. So, that’s like 2 1/2 percent of the foul calls were actually challenged. He’s tied with (Joel) Embiid for eight and nine (eighth and ninth) in terms of number of fouls drawn in the season. Six and seven are Jaylen Brown and (Victor) Wembanyama.

“But I understand, if you listen to the narrative, you’d think he’s (Nos.) 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.”

Following the season-ending loss in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals to the San Antonio Spurs, Gilgeous-Alexander was asked if he’d offer any input on the impending offseason changes. He denied that notion, saying he’d trust Presti, “the greatest GM ever,” to rearrange things accordingly.

When asked if he’d then lean on SGA at all this summer, Presti noted that he’s always in conversation with players — even if they aren’t necessarily impacting team-building directly.

“All my conversations aren’t necessarily going to somebody for input, but just a lot of the conversations that I’m having with the players are (because) I like to learn from them and understand what they’re seeing,” Presti said.

“Shai is the same. Like, I love talking to him and understand what he’s seeing and what he’s thinking during the season. When it comes to these types of things, I’m never going to put him in a position where it could compromise him with anybody or his teammates or anything like that. I know how to handle that. I would never do that. Ultimately, I have to make the best decisions for the team. I hope I have enough of a relationship with him where we can talk and I can decide what I feel we need to do.”