The Shai Infowars

It's getting ugly out there.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is cementing his stature as the league's best player and one of its all-time greatest scorers. While dominating the league, the Thunder have become overnight villains, and their star player is driving the opposing fan bases crazy. This stuff always happens, and no amount of positivity or pushback out of Oklahoma City will change the sentiment around a great team and the misery they evoke from other fan bases.

But...

Some of our very favorite media peers, those whose knowledge and insights I admire and study, have been driving us crazy.

Exhibit A: Here's one of us taking issue with Scott Van Pelt's "auto-whistle" take after OKC's Game 1 blowout.

SVP regretted his Game 1 take, and followed it up with a segment making clear he is not one of Shai's haters.

To paraphrase: Shai is great...but he's occasionally awful to watch.

Exhibit B: Here's one of us, defending Nate Duncan for having a take a Hawks fan didn't like:

And here we are a month later, blasting Duncan for a take we didn't like:

I'll be honest: I initially penciled in a recantation and apology from Daily Thunder to Duncan on my editorial calendar, because my respect for him is sincere. It wouldn't be our first mea culpa. We have joked that our team at DT takes turns being the "social media manager"—not to promote or cover OKC at different times, but to manage each other's temperament when social media irritates us.

But after reviewing the tape, I'm opting for this editorial instead. Before we jumped in, Duncan finished tweeting about Game 3, in which SGA scored 42 points (!) on 15-18 shooting (!!) mid-sweep of the Suns. Duncan almost matched Shai's 83% efficiency, spending 80% of his tweets tracking fouls: his first, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth post were all about the Thunder whistle. (A note about Alex Caruso's plus/minus, and another on Devin Booker's struggles, were also in the mix.)

This is dumb.

To answer Nate's question: yes, we can read. To paraphrase Duncan: Shai is great, but the pushoffs are unfair. OKC is great, but the broadcast should be focused on Lu Dort's antics.

We have been reading volumes of these backhanded compliments after every Shai performance for two seasons. SGA is the league's foremost bucket-getter, but just its seventh-most frequent foul drawer. Instead of clipping highlight reels of the MVP's double-digit shot makes, the reaction-sphere is increasingly driven by slow-mo video of a handful of shooting fouls.

The most prominent critics used to hold their fire until performances like Game 1, when SVP bemoaned Shai's 5-18 FGA/15-17 FTA line. Now, the jeers come out after any individual possession that tickles the anti-Shai algorithm, even as he's melting the boxscore against his latest, helpless defender.

Intentionally or not, Duncan was feeding the wrong side of a really dumb take war.

The dumbest take: Shai's great stats are due to the referees, not his greatness.

The reality: Shai is objectively great, and there is no evidence he benefits more from a favorable whistle than the rest of the league's volume scorers and drivers.

The dumb take, made palatable for smarter people: Shai is objectively great, and there is no evidence he benefits more from a favorable whistle than the rest of the league's volume scorers and drivers. But...

Like us, hoops media members get peppered with Shai hate anytime they cover his team. Andy Bailey says 60% of his replies are OKC fouling complaints. Several NBA coaches have identified Shai, on the record, as one of the worst foul grifters in the sport. Zach Lowe and Brian Windhorst have both reported league-wide hostility toward the Thunder's whistle. Booker said the NBA risked being viewed as scripted entertainment if referees weren't held accountable for the Thunder calls he didn't like. Jaden McDaniels, Anthony Edwards, and Dillon Brooks have submitted their protests as well.

While they are not willful clickbaiters, the biggest hoops voices have all (excepting Windhorst) been giving oxygen to a conspiratorial wildfire. It's tough to find a Shai segment without the "but..." these days. Infusing so much Thunder coverage with "the free throw discourse," however nuanced and measured (as the Duncans and Lowes of national hoops coverage typically are), lends credence to a very dumb take. Saying "you're overstating the data, but SGA annoys me, too" amplifies a very stupid idea.

There simply isn't supply or demand for free throw takes on Deni Avdija, Luka Doncic, Jimmy Butler, Anthony Edwards, Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Jaylen Brown, Devin Booker, or any of Shai's actual foul-drawing peers. There are no podcast segments or newsletters dedicated to how annoying or acceptable the whistle feels for these players, while the stat tables and film indicate they are just as "floppy" as SGA (if not more). These names may come up when addressing Shai's whistle, but not on their own.

Most people outside Oklahoma City may agree with Duncan online, but that's because Twitter is full of emotional opinions detached from reality. Most people probably thought "free throw merchant" was an apt criticism of SGA before Doris Burke became the first to blurt out the moniker on national TV. Knowledgeable, responsible media members are not supposed to amplify idiotic conspiracies just because they're popular.

The conspiracy takes hold.

Ethan Strauss was exceedingly reasonable on this topic in a recent article. But he underestimates the prevalence of conspiracy brain, par for the course on social media these days, and how it's already taken hold of the Shai consensus. OKC hate is, from Strauss's perspective, the rare outrage without a "serious conspiracy theory underpinning it...nobody (or very few) believe that Adam Silver literally wants to contrive their success."

I wish he were right. Caitlin Cooper knows better:

The Basketball Illuminati podcast exists for a reason: the NBA is and has been rife with conspiracy theories forever. The idea that Adam Silver is a puppet master is ubiquitous. Not everyone believes he is orchestrating a dynasty in Oklahoma City, but many believe he's orchestrating everything, including which stars and teams get preferential treatment. OKC is the most popular vessel at the moment.

The ~smart~ fans, like one featured in Strauss's article, are writing letters to the editors podcasters on the topic. They understand that the data and the rulebook don't implicate SGA as the worst grifter ever, but...they still hate his particular pathway to the free throw line. It's how he draws fouls, not how frequently he does. This is the sophisticated version of the braindead take we've seen all-caps'd, all season: the numbers may not show it, but the way Shai draws a relatively ordinary amount of fouls is offensive enough to create an officiating crisis.

“SGA I think is the best guard since Kobe and may surpass Kobe in a few years, but I don’t blame people for finding his game and his team gross.”
- Ethan Strauss's reader mail (emphasis added)

And the social media machine is matching the Shai haters with whichever media personality meets their level of sophistication. If all you need is one dumb clip of a Shai rip-through, you can confirm your bias any day of the week. Do you need your irrational Shai hate couched within a measured look at the free throw data—appealing to your self-perception as a level-headed fan? X will soon fill your feed with the more nuanced version of the same dumb take, with the added gravitas of an indoor beanie.

We've been here before with the loudest, dumbest hot takes from Skip Bayless, Stephen A. Smith, and others feeding the loudest, dumbest trolls watching the sport. Responsible analysts used to reject these non-issues, refusing to throw any more red meat into the algorithm. Now, they're triangulating their takes to accommodate the idiocy running rampant among their audiences.

Shai is great, but...people are saying!

Thunder propaganda?

Duncan has never denied Shai's greatness, and shares SVP's sentiment: a mild expression of annoyance at SGA's whistle drew the ire of biased, sensitive Thunder homers. I won't defend every random tweeter, but the idea that media professionals are consciously caping for OKC, as the kids say, is obnoxious.

Earlier this week, Matt Moore accused yours truly of "making up shit" to cope with anti-tanking measures that could hurt the Thunder. Love you too, Matt. Earlier this season, Tony Jones uttered a pseudo-report that went viral, accusing OKC media of taking orders from the Thunder front office and turning the Jazz's tanking into a league-wide controversy. Ironically, that dollar store conspiracy theory did become a trending topic. Lowe, Duncan, and other national media figures said that they couldn't corroborate the rumor, but no one ruled it out. Jones never addressed the report in writing, and has since called for a player to assault Lu Dort on the court.

Why, again, are we the untrustworthy ones?

For the record: I have never had a problem acknowledging that Shai often uses his shiftiness and lethal shooting to put defenders into compromising positions, seeking out and embellishing contact when said defenders can no longer legally contest his shot or impede his drive. This is an uncontroversial fact, not a smoking gun. Shai has room to grow as a foul drawer, which is why he gets penalized for more offensive fouls and earns fewer and-1s than his peers. Compilations of SGA's most blatant shoulder bumps, head snaps, and forearm extensions juuuuuust outside the limits don't prove that he gets too many calls—they demonstrate why he's not getting more. He just had a game-winner waved off thanks to a pushoff, people.

It’s 2’s Time

Shai Is Upgrading the Three-Point Era, Two Points at a Time

Daily Thundercraymondfelton

Basketball is a data-rich sport with an anecdotal viewing experience. We just finished over a thousand more games featuring hundreds of possessions and dozens of whistles every night. As Benjamin Howard put it, "The human brain is really good at pattern matching things that aren’t there and as a society, we’re really good at groupthink." Fans remember sequences, not distributions. One slow-motion replay lingers longer than twenty routine possessions. A Lu Dort flop on one end, followed by a soft call for Shai on the other? OKC gets away with everything, but their opponents do not.

Just because most non-Thunder fans intermittently interpret Shai's play with a critical lens doesn't mean they are more or less objective than those watching every single Shai possession.

We’re also trained to recognize "ethical" fouls through archetypes. For my entire life, there has been a maxim that lead scorers should seek out contact and get to the line if their team can't buy a bucket. That is celebrated in the more violent archetype that MJ, LeBron, Ant, and Giannis inhabit while ramming into contact with downhill force and crashes at the rim. Shai lives between that archetype and the distance and desperation lane: the deep pull-ups and heady screen navigation from Curry or Luka that generate panicked flails to keep the shot from leaving their fingertips.

SGA is not an above-the-rim finisher who forces collisions, though he finishes through contact relentlessly. He is not a high-volume pull-up three-point bomber, though he shoots a ridiculous percentage from almost every inch of the court. His game operates in the intermediate space—inside the arc, outside the rim, and after the defense has lost leverage but before it has fully collapsed. The contact usually arrives after Shai has already won. Not because the whistle created the advantage, but because his footwork, handle, reach, timing, and shot-making leave defenders trying to recover from a possession they already lost.

Shai is not tricking officials into padding his greatness. He is putting defenders in compromising positions, then making them choose between giving up the shot, fouling, or doing both.

He's uniquely great.

Typing back.

For our part, we have been scolded for covering the free throw debate at all. Why feed the trolls? Why ask for evidence of the allegations shouted at us after every game? Ignore this dumb topic, we've been urged. Boy, have we tried.

Media on media violence is never our goal, and hopefully this is the last post of this nature on DailyThunder.com. I can assure you that Nate Duncan, Scott Van Pelt, Zach Lowe, Ryen Russillo, and several other national media members are not desperate to "engagement farm" OKC content, but...I can assure you that talking heads like Nick Wright, Bill Simmons, and Jaylen Brown are willful clickbait merchants trading on vibes rather than facts. This is not to mention our growing list of muted accounts getting millions of impressions via lazy Shai clips and disingenuous takery after every single game.

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