Relocating to the perimeter, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander received Ajay Mitchell’s kick-out pass. He immediately went for the outside pull-up jumper that swished in. The reigning MVP did his patented gun-pump celebration and then yelled a few expletives towards Stephon Castle’s way.
The Oklahoma City Thunder finally got one in their 119-98 win over the San Antonio Spurs. After losing three straight to the same squad this season, the reigning NBA champions regained their confidence.
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Gilgeous-Alexander finished with 34 points on 11-of-23 shooting, five assists and five rebounds. He shot 1-of-4 from 3 and went 11-of-13 on free throws. He also had four blocks.
Understanding the stakes, Gilgeous-Alexander stepped up and turned in a performance that should help his odds to be the second-ever unanimous MVP winner. No team-friendly approach in this one. He went out for blood from the jump. The jumper was there all night. So were the drives to the basket.
Castle might be better equipped than most to slow down the NBA’s best scorer. But that’s all he can do — slow him down. Not stop. Gilgeous-Alexander had 13 points out of the gate in the first quarter. As the Thunder slammed the door in the third quarter, he led the way with 15 points.
Gilgeous-Alexander scored his points in every way imaginable. Drives to the basket resulted in pretty finishes. Sudden stops had the Spurs puzzled as he drilled pull-up jumpers at a high clip. He finally cracked the code of Castle’s one-on-one defense. A busy night at the free-throw line tells you San Antonio has to resort to fouls to get stops.
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Defensively, Gilgeous-Alexander more than carried his weight on that side of the ball. The block numbers jump out, but the rotations were crisp. The closeouts were textbook. The communication was loud. Nobody will confuse him for an all-world defender and occasionally, he has bad habits, but he turns it up a few levels for these primetime matchups. You saw that near the end of the third quarter on an unreal highlight play.
Going up for a desperate alley-oop attempt to spark some energy, Victor Wembanyama didn’t even feel the ball reach his fingertips. Gilgeous-Alexander was right behind him on the weak side. He leaped off the floor to deny the connection with an empathetic rejection.
“It’s the same thing as like every other player in the league. Every guy has every basketball player throughout the existence of basketball has things that they’re comfortable doing,” Gilgeous-Alexander said about defending Wembanyama. “The better ones are better at getting to those things through the game plan, through the defensive schemes and stuff like that. And defensively, it’s your job to try to take them out of their comfort zone as much as you can throughout the night.”
The pull-up jumper is what turned Gilgeous-Alexander into a perennial MVP candidate. That’s what he went with to bury the Spurs in the second half. When he gets it going like that, nobody else in the NBA can match his peak. Everybody else did their job, but he was at the front of the line.
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“It’s never about the other team. It’s always about us. We’ve gotten to where we’ve gotten because we’ve focused on ourselves. That’s the only thing every night that stays in constant. We can go out there and control what we can do out on the floor every night,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “No matter who’s on the other side or what the personnel looks like. No matter where they’re coming from or what we just did the night before game-wise. Every night, we can control XYZ for us and we do that, we give ourselves a shot.”
After Christmas, Gilgeous-Alexander declared the Spurs were better than the Thunder. Three straight losses to them will do that. The fanbase may have argued differently online, but the reigning MVP expressed his opinion on the lopsided regular-season series. Now, though, he believes this butt-whooping corrected some things.
“Tonight’s result tells us that when we play a certain way, with a certain sense of urgency, with a certain sense of force and aggressiveness and attention to detail, it doesn’t matter who’s on the other side,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I think we knew that about this group. I think it’s about us getting to that point without having to lose or be pushed there. Not to say we haven’t done it before, we’ve done it multiple times. But I think the more we can get ourselves to that mental mindframe, the more we’ll be better off for sure. Nothing I didn’t expect. I know if we play a certain way, we can beat anybody in the world.”
This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: What does win over Spurs mean for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder?