It's 2's Time
John Henry vs. the Steam Engine
For a dystopian decade (2015-2024, RIP), the entire league worked to replicate the three-point offensive efficiency first perfected by the Warriors’ Splash Brothers. Steph Curry built the spacing locomotive that tore through the entire NBA, as its competitors scrambled to catch up to Golden State's revolutionary three-point math. Only in Houston, where James Stepback Harden managed to streamline the three-or-guaranteed system (get a layup, get fouled, or jack a bomb), did the formula itself (3>2=TRUE) almost close the gap in talent between the peak Warriors and the field.
Other teams made lesser copies that dulled our senses with stubborn, familiar success. We were subjected to entire postseasons that hinged on the random three-point shooting of Anthony Davis and Jae Crowder. LeBron and KD already served as the templates for players like Luka and Cade taking the baton as heliocentric playmakers who had the size and skill needed for their franchise to channel every hope, dream, and possession through their hands (specifically, through their high-PnR actions in search of a shot at the arc or the rim). When Kobe’s biggest star devotee won the 2024 title while playing like the platonic ideal of Trevor Ariza, it felt like the math had won out for good.
The locomotive was well in motion, the two-pointer fading from memory in a cloud of steam. But Shai never stopped calling his number.
The Steel Driver
Since 2021-2022, the Thunder offense has featured the most common action in all of basketball: Shai driving.
Only Shai, Cade Cunningham, and Jalen Brunson have been top-five in drives taken over the last two seasons. Only Shai and Brunson have been top-five over the last four. Shai has been top-two for five straight seasons. He's in a class of his own.
This season, SGA once again paces the NBA in most per-possession and overall driving categories. He ranks first or second in nearly every driving outcome when compared to Cade, Luka Doncic, Brunson, Deni Avdija, and Devin Booker, the rest of the league’s most effective volume drivers.
Shai converts most of those drives into points, racking up two-point buckets like a big (9.18 2PM). His True Shooting percentage is within a half-point of the giants who lead the league in paint touches: Deandre Ayton, Jalen Duren, Zach Edey, and Jarrett Allen. And he's generated more than seventy additional made twos this season than frontcourt monsters like Alperen Sengun, Nikola Jokic, and Julius Randle.
But Shai doen't just attack and score an unusual amount. Where those drives end is even more abnormal: he shoots and scores the most of any isolation player in the league, but takes the bulk of his attempts from midrange. Among guards with over 50 games played, Shai ranks 85th in three-point attempts per game this season. Just 22.9% of his shot volume comes from three, and only 1.4% comes from dunks. Yet he still makes the math work.
There is an openness to the way he attacks, a willingness to keep an eye on every patch of hardwood left open by the defender(s) until he knows he’s penetrated or retreated to the best spot available from which to make his decisive action. As he recently put it, Shai can find the correct multiple-choice answer to any defender’s pop quiz: If you give him a straight line, he will take it. Go under, he'll fire from deep. Pull back and he'll drain the middy. Selling out to contest the shot? He’ll shake you and then bake your big at the hoop. And if you try to guard him with your shoulder after losing the first step, he will angle his way to the rim in ways you cannot legally recover from. Deal with it.
Whether he’s bee-lining, fading away, zig-zagging, or stepping through to an efficient shot, there’s no safe zone you can cede to Shai between the arc and the rim.
That's why Shai’s lethality in the midrange matters so much. A jumper is not the most ideal outcome for an SGA possession, but it’s the worst worst-case scenario defenses have had to live with in years. A clean release from Shai, anywhere, is now better than a 50/50 proposition. 54.4161525% to be exact, good for 1.088323049 points at a time.
If you only counted Shai’s midrange attempts—no layups, no threes, no free throws—he would still rank third in isolation points per possession in the NBA, trailing only Luka and Booker.
SGA is comfortable in between the most efficiency-friendly zones marked off by painted markings, untethered to the three-point line, restricted area, and free-throw stripe others are glued to. He eats in all the spaces between, and has revived the two-pointer as a go-to guards like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwyane Wade used to feed their families with before modern offensive schemes tossed it out with the trash.
Early Swings
You had to pay close attention to see Shai coming.
Drafted by the Clippers in 2018 as a prototypical 3-and-D project and traded to OKC ahead of his sophomore season in LA's pursuit of real, modern volume scorers, NBA fans (including those in Oklahoma City at the time) saw flashes of an All-Star hopeful in SGA rather than the makings of a legend. The analysts didn’t see it coming either: no one projected Shai's ability to become the most prolific and efficient scorer with the awkward angles and off-speed bursts they appreciated in his game. In his first two seasons, SGA played a complementary role on tough-out playoff teams in LA and Oklahoma City.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander 25 PTS 2 REB, 2 AST, 1 STL, 9/15 FG, 3/5 3FG, 74.6 TS% vs GSW. Game 4 2019 Playoffs.
— Rookie Performances (@NBARookiePlays) March 13, 2026
SGA first playoff series. pic.twitter.com/28LG7Zdkp4
The signs were always there. As a rookie against the Warriors in the 2019 playoffs, Shai produced two 20-plus games against the very team that had seemingly buried the two-pointer in the death lineup’s reign of threes. Shai hit midrange jumpers in Steph’s face, threes when bigs ducked screens, and layups around Draymond Green’s lanky contests.
He rapidly improved in Oklahoma City, but Thunder fans were still crossing their fingers every offseason in the hopes he’d unlock his offense via conventional priorities (more pull-up threes). Shai understood the most important step he would take was the first one to the rim, over and over. As he embraced primary scoring duties in his young career, he was determined to attack the cup against defenders like Rudy Gobert.
"His shot distribution yesterday was almost perfect in regards to the most efficient areas on the floor. He took 12 shots total: five coming at the rim, five coming from three-point range, and two from the midrange." - Film Study: Shai at the Rim, 8/4/20
During the Thunder tank years (2020-2022, RIP), Shai transformed from an efficient secondary scorer into the league’s premier bucket-getter via drive. In the recent past, we were conditioned to wince when seeing a player like Shai would go +17% on more than one attempt per game from his better midrange side of the court. Shouldn’t he be working to shoot 11% better from the other corner instead?
But Shai has never settled for improving one area of shooting at the expense of another. His improve-everywhere diligence eventually resulted in this season's floor-is-lava shot chart, with just two measly zones where he is not above average from the floor. He kept up with the league's efficiency demands from the arc, the rim, and the line, while patching yesterday’s midrange packages for today's game.
The Work Holds Up
By 2024, 2 was pounding on the door to the Finals with a shocking lack of three-pointers in his shot diet. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had developed inside the Pace-and-Space movement without subjecting his skillset to its most crude demands. In his first MVP campaign, SGA crashed the three-point party just as the league’s playstyles began fraying into more chaotic and open-minded strategy. Before we knew it, Shai already won a title built on the strength of his legendary two-point scoring profile. OKC won while averaging 10.1 made threes in the 2025 Finals, a testament to their defense and Shai's knack for chaining singles and doubles when the home runs never came.
SGA’s scoring loop has always been an off-kilter chain of advantages—drive, create an imbalance, take the next marginal advantage, and find the net. But Shai has ascended from weirdly effective to historically dominant, lifting the bar for volume scoring in the efficiency era. Mr. Consistent has shown the world how to score 31.5 points per game across multiple seasons at peak-Dame efficiency, while only needing one or two three-pointers a night to do it. He's staying closer to the bullseye than those in his 30-point peer groups (among his contemporaries, only Luka, Giannis, and Harden have also tallied three 30-point seasons; among the legends, only Shai, Michael, Wilt, Oscar, Iverson, and The Logo have tallied four or more such seasons).
We may not think of Shai like the tall tales that won titles manning the frontcourt in Milwaukee and Denver, but he’s as responsible as Giannis and Jokic for keeping the two-pointer alive. As Kenrich Williams recently alluded, Point 2 has entered the halls of the league’s best ever shooters and scorers.
Kobe.2, Dirk.2, CP3.2. 2 is the upgrade.
Not a Fairytale
NBA fans can be forgiven for thinking Shai’s recent run of scoring dominance, MVP dominance, conference-finals dominance, head-to-head MVP dominance, and championship round dominance appeared out of nowhere. Most people weren’t paying close attention while he built himself, year by year, into the strongest scoring machine of our time.
And when he isn't going 100% in the clutch, Shai's style won't always leap off the screen. Curry can still electrify the audience with a 3-for-5 stretch on a random Tuesday night in Atlanta. Giannis is always one gather away from posterizing a pitiable foe. It takes watching several episodes of Shai going 11-13 or 11-16 or 13-18 or 12-19 or 14-21 against the best competition to appreciate his might.
If his shooting holds, Shai will join Steph Curry as the only two players to record a 30+ PPG season with better than 65% True Shooting1!. It’s a big if; one human shooting performance in Shai’s remaining games could lower the ceiling, let alone a truly bad night from the floor. But regardless of how near the tippy-top his percentages end up this time around, Shai has now turned in four straight seasons with 30+ points and 62.6%+ TS. Only Steph has done the same more than once.
Despite the idiotic screams that Shai is playing phony basketball, he’s reclaimed the halfcourt for isolation play that MJ and Kobe once glorified, while embracing a two-way Thunder team build that looks a lot like the purist’s ideal for “real” five-on-five hoops. League-wide midrange attempts had been plummeting as teams optimized for rim and three-point attempts, but Shai has helped halt that trend for the next generation of hoopers. Shai isn’t ruining one-on-one play. He's rescuing it.
The one area where Shai still trails some of his peers? Don’t laugh: It’s foul drawing.