Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored the winning points deep into double overtime as the Oklahoma City Thunder started their NBA title defence with a 125-124 victory over the Houston Rockets.<\/p>\n
Last season’s MVP scored 35 points, including two from the free-throw line with just 2.3 seconds remaining in second overtime, to get the champions off to a positive start.<\/p>\n
Houston’s Alperun Sengun top-scored with 39 and also hit a career-high five three-pointers.<\/p>\n
But Chet Holmgren, who scored 28 points for the Thunder, played a major role alongside match-winner Gilgeous-Alexander.<\/p>\n
“Grit, determination and defence,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of their performance.<\/p>\n
“We know that when we do it (on defence) we give ourselves a chance no matter what’s going on – makes, misses, good luck or bad luck. We did enough defence to get the win. We’re pretty rusty, but it’s a good start.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored the winning points deep into double overtime as the Oklahoma City Thunder started their NBA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-231780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}