Shai Gilgeous-Alexander marked his return from injury with 36 points as the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Denver Nuggets 127-121 in overtime.<\/p>\n
The NBA’s reigning Most Valuable Player had been out of action since sustaining an abdominal strain on 3 February and missed nine games.<\/p>\n
He played 34 minutes on his return, but remained on the bench in overtime as Alex Caruso guided the Thunder to their sixth win from their past eight games.<\/p>\n
“Felt good,” said Gilgeous-Alexander. “I’m just thankful to be back.” <\/p>\n
The 27-year-old was in the action from the start, opening his account with a layup before being called for an early technical foul for throwing the ball at Denver’s Nikola Jokic, who made contact with him after play had stopped.<\/p>\n
Thunder forward Luguentz Dort was later ejected for a flagrant foul after he tripped Jokic, sparking a shoving match after which Jokic and Oklahoma City’s Jaylin Williams receive technical fouls.<\/p>\n
Caruso drove to the basket in the final seconds of regulation, but his shot bounced off the rim at the buzzer to send the game to extra time.<\/p>\n
However, the Thunder scored the first five points in overtime and hung on for the win to maintain their two-game lead over the San Antonio Spurs at the top of the Western Conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shai Gilgeous-Alexander marked his return from injury with 36 points as the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Denver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-505225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}