Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the league MVP and will likely be named Finals MVP if the Thunder win the title. This, however, hasn’t stopped the haters.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s father recently defended his son over the “free-throw merchant” title he has earned online.
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Related: T-Wolves fans taunt SGA in Game 4: “Free Throw Merchant”
In a recent interview, Gilgeous-Alexander’s father, Vaughn Alexander, spoke about the negativity surrounding his son’s game.
“I’ve mentioned this about 400 times, here goes 401. At the end of the day, basketball is a game that has rules, right? And some of the rules are that you can’t— if you get caught out of position, you can’t stick your hand out.
“You can’t touch people, can’t foul, and if I know that and I’m playing the game, I’m going to play the game by the rules, right?
“So I’m going to blow by you, you hit me, I go up, you get caught in the ear, you get caught in a bad angle, you get caught leaning the right way.
“I put my feet, I attack your feet, I put my shoulder on your hip. All this great stuff, all these good things, it’s going to result in fouls.
“He’s just playing basketball. If you want that to stop, you guys can change the rules. I don’t think we want to change the rules right now, we want to leave them the same.
“He’s not drawing as many fouls as Michael Jordan and the top guys, just name all the guys back there, even this year he’s not drawing as many fouls. He’s probably like top, not even top 10 in fouls drawn, what are we really talking about?
“Talk about the guys that are drawing more fouls, I guess they’re not ‘the man’ right now, so we don’t have nothing to talk about. It’s just about Shai being loud right now, MVP and all that stuff, so we’re going to have these things to talk about. Whatever, at the end of the day, we’re not really worried about it.”
SGA’s free-throw attempts
This season, SGA attempted 8.8 free throws per game, which puts him at 230 for all-time attempts per game in a season. The highest Gilgeous-Alexander shows up on the list is 45th with 10.9 attempts per game. This occurred in the 2022-23 season.
In the top 10, Wilt Chamberlain shows up six times, including holding the first four spots. So, who is the real free-throw merchant?
