{"id":271370,"date":"2025-11-08T16:06:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/271370\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T16:06:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:06:12","slug":"shai-gilgeous-alexander-wants-more-and-that-should-frighten-the-rest-of-the-nba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/271370\/","title":{"rendered":"Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wants more and that should frighten the rest of the NBA"},"content":{"rendered":"

SACRAMENTO, Calif. \u2014 At first glance, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has everything an NBA star could want at the moment.<\/p>\n

A Larry O\u2019Brien trophy from Oklahoma City\u2019s title run in June. The Michael Jordan trophy \u2014 aka the MVP award \u2014 from that same season. And after a 132-101 win over the Sacramento Kings, his team boasts a league-leading 9-1 record that is quite remarkable considering the Thunder\u2019s second-best player, Jalen Williams, has yet to play after undergoing offseason wrist surgery.<\/p>\n

But to hear the 27-year-old reflect on how the Thunder got here during his postgame press conference on Friday night, when he admitted that he was displeased with the way the team reached the NBA\u2019s mountaintop, was to realize that Gilgeous-Alexander still wants a whole lot more.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly speaking, I didn\u2019t like the way we won, if that makes sense,\u201d said Gilgeous-Alexander, whose Thunder survived a seven-game series against Denver in the second round and beat the Indiana Pacers in seven games in the Finals. \u201cI didn\u2019t think we won an NBA championship playing our best basketball. That was the first time we\u2019d been that far in the playoffs, so it was a learning experience for us. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut it takes another level of focus, discipline, assertiveness, aggression, to be who we were in the regular season, and do that throughout the postseason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who they were, to review, was a historically great group<\/a> that went 68-14 while posting the league\u2019s best net rating (by a massive margin over Boston<\/a>), the league\u2019s best defense (with Orlando a distant second<\/a>) and the third-best offense. Then came the playoffs, when Nikola Joki\u0107 and the Nuggets came so close to knocking them out and the Pacers did the same before Tyrese Haliburton\u2019s Achilles tendon tear in the first quarter of Game 7 changed everything.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were definitely more dominant in the regular season than the postseason,\u201d Gilgeous-Alexander continued. \u201cSo yeah, that was the biggest thing for me. And for me, as well \u2014 as a player, I don\u2019t think I was as good in the postseason as I was in the regular season. Now, it naturally happens when you play a team seven times in a row, and they get to scout (you) seven times in a row. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut I feel like I could have been better, so I try to control that. And then that mentality just trickles over to the team stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does it ever.<\/p>\n

As these first 10 games have shown, Gilgeous-Alexander is more than capable of carrying the kind of load that only the all-time greats can endure. Not only is he producing offensively at a similar level to what he did last season \u2014 33 points, six assists and five rebounds per game so far \u2014 but he\u2019s receiving rave reviews for the attention to defensive detail that has Oklahoma City dominating on that end again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They currently have the league\u2019s top defensive rating (104.8 points allowed per 100 possessions), with Detroit (109.6) in second place. And again, that\u2019s without Williams, who was named to the league\u2019s All-Defensive Second Team last season.<\/p>\n

That two-way ability is an X-factor of sorts when it comes to the MVP discussion, as only Milwaukee\u2019s Giannis Antetokounmpo and San Antonio\u2019s Victor Wembanyama can stake a similar claim among the current crop of candidates<\/a> (which is subject to change, of course). Add in Gilgeous-Alexander\u2019s early lead on the narrative front, with the Thunder maintaining a 73-win pace despite being down an All-Star in Williams, who was one of 13 players to average at least 20 points, five rebounds and five assists last season, and you start to see how the reigning MVP could wind up taking home that hardware again. Williams\u2019 timeline to return is expected to be reevaluated next week.<\/p>\n

Yet the most frightening part for the rest of the Association, and the thing that has the Thunder so confident that their best is yet to come, is that Gilgeous-Alexander has an obsession with improvement that isn\u2019t going away. He often talks about his own game as if it\u2019s an out-of-body experience, with Gilgeous-Alexander expressing a deep curiosity about how great he can ultimately become. When I asked him to assess the distance between this current state and his proverbial ceiling, the answer was enough to make you wonder where his ascension might end.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say pretty far away,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s just so many areas of basketball, I feel like, especially at my position, having the ball as much as I do. \u2026 I\u2019m the point of attack offensively. There\u2019s playing without the ball. There\u2019s different levels of scoring. There\u2019s the complete other side of the ball. There\u2019s scoring in transition. There\u2019s just so many sides and parts to the game that the greatest players have mastered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve heard coaches talk about playing against (former NBA All-Star Rajon) Rondo, and it\u2019s almost like you\u2019re playing against a coach on the floor. He knows all your plays, and he knows what you\u2019re going to do next, and things like that. There\u2019s just so many angles and ways that you can give yourself and your team an edge to win a basketball possession, a quarter, and then ultimately a game. So until I kind of get my grips on all of those, which will probably be a long time, I\u2019d say pretty far away.\u201d<\/p>\n

So no, as it turns out, he\u2019s not the slightest bit satisfied.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what makes him really special (as a) superstar,\u201d said Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein, who had a monster performance (33 points, 19 rebounds and three blocks) against the Kings. \u201cIt\u2019s really easy to follow him. He puts in a lot of work. He puts the team first at all times, and I think that\u2019s what makes him an amazing leader.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe might not be talking all the time, but \u2026 his (because of his) actions, we all follow. He\u2019s been amazing in that sense since I got here. You don\u2019t see that with a lot of superstars, and you have to give him a lot of respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

No arguments here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SACRAMENTO, Calif. \u2014 At first glance, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has everything an NBA star could want at the moment.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,5548,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-271370","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-oklahoma-city-thunder","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271370","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=271370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}