Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is finding things difficult against the San Antonio Spurs. And he’s finding it difficult to answer questions about his teammates in postgame interviews.
After OKC’s Game 2 victory in San Antonio to level the Western Conference Finals, SGA was asked about the defensive impact of Isaiah Hartenstein against Victor Wembanyama. However, instead of praising his teammate, he bizarrely said he didn’t have a positive impact on the game. Later, he cleared it up by saying he simply didn’t hear the question and tried to freestyle an answer.
Well, after the Spurs thumped the Thunder in Game 4 by a 103-82 margin, another response from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander about a teammate went viral after the game.
This time in the postgame press conference, SGA was asked about what the team could do to get Chet Holmgren more involved offensively. And apparently, that was a question that took a lot of thought, as Gilgeous-Alexander didn’t have an answer for several seconds in a clip that went viral.
Now in fairness to SGA, he did in fact have a real answer to the question and didn’t just sit there in silence before being asked to leave the stage. He said that the Thunder need to find him more in space or in the dunker slot and put him in better positions to use his strengths offensively.
Of course, that clip isn’t going to go viral the same way as the one where it seems like he doesn’t have an answer.
Social media manipulation? Yes. But the reason it racked up millions of views is that there is some truth to the notion that the Thunder don’t really have a good way to get one of their top three players (top two without Jalen Williams healthy) more involved offensively. We all know Victor Wembanyama takes his matchups with Chet Holmgren personally, but it doesn’t seem like the Thunder big man wants the smoke.
So far in the conference finals, Holmgren is averaging just 11.3 PPG and 6.0 RPG per game. Against the Lakers in the conference semis, he averaged a near double-double with 20.0 PPG and 9.8 RPG.
Any mortal human being is probably going to be stumped when trying to deal with Wemby on the defensive end with his insane alien-like height and reach capabilities. Maybe SGA and Chet need to go back to the drawing board and ask themselves, “What a pro wants.”
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