Part of the problem — to the extent that there is a problem, anyway — is the dunking. Its absence, I mean.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has played 703 minutes in the 2025-26 NBA season, and he has four slam dunks. As in, one fewer than five. IV, if you want to get all Roman about it. Solamente cuatro.
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Three of them came against the Kings, too. Which, y’know, if a tree falls in the forest, and all that:
And then there the assists. Don’t get me wrong: Gilgeous-Alexander is capable of the kinds of thread-the-needle-in-traffic, lefty-hook-pass-on-the-move, cross-court-fastball-right-in-the-shooting-pocket feeds that generate oohs and aahs …
… but SGA only throws about 40 passes per game, and more often than not, his setups skew simpler. Draw two to the ball, because they know if they try to guard you straight up, they’re dead where they stand. Take it slow, play off two feet, and keep your eyes up. Find a teammate — either the one who’s exactly where he’s supposed to be, or the one who’s about to get there, because at this point, the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder, off to a 20-1 start and looking like a threat to rewrite the record books, can probably play the hand blind.
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Make the easy pass, create the wide-open shot, and profit. Then, when you get the stop — and you’re going to get the stop, because you’ve got the best defense not only of this NBA season, but perhaps of the last 50 — come down and do it again. And again. And again.
The individual stat lines don’t help much, either, because they rarely make your eyes bulge out of your skull. Two 40-plus-point performances this season, which frankly seems low because at this point, 30 is just expected — including, famously, by the man himself:
Two games with double-digit dimes, because OKC’s one of eight teams this season with at least eight players averaging at least two helpers per game. No 10-rebound outings, because listen, what do you think we pay Isaiah Hartenstein for?
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Besides: It’s not always easy to rack up monster numbers when you’re consistently getting the rest of the night off.
In an NBA dominated by kaijus posting jaw-dropping numbers, your eyes can sometimes glaze over those non-mutant box scores. Just like they slide past a smooth drive through the paint for a scoop layup, a one-dribble pull-up from the elbow or a hiccup-quick right foot jab into a stepback 3 going left.
It’s hard to make memorable highlight reels out of below-the-rim finishes, midrange Js and two-hand chest passes back out to a popping Isaiah Joe. But it’s also hard to make those plays again, and again, and again, with the economy of movement of an elite marathon runner, while never messing anything up.
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It all contributes to a sense of frictionlessness in Gilgeous-Alexander’s ongoing growth, from lottery pick to trade-haul jewel to starter to All-Star to All-NBA to All-Everything. (OK, maybe there’s been some friction.) How do you track the development of a player who made a leap three years ago and then … just hasn’t stopped leaping?
We all know the saying about how progress isn’t linear. That’s the thing, though: These lines look awfully straight.
DARKO’s daily plus-minus metric shows Gilgeous-Alexander’s impact on the game is greater than ever.
Gilgeous-Alexander currently leads the league in estimated plus-minus.
Lest we glaze over or slide past, let’s say it plainly: Gilgeous-Alexander won the scoring title, regular-season MVP, Western Conference Finals MVP, Finals MVP and the NBA championship last season. And this season, thus far, he has been even better. At virtually everything.
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“He’s to the point now where he’s touching up the edges,” Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault told Sam Amick of The Athletic earlier this season. “Your growth curve tends to be much higher earlier on, as you are accumulating experiences. But he’s subtly getting better. He’s had a great defensive start (to this season). On the offensive end, he’s moving it earlier and with more intentionality than he ever has. He’s been on that track.”
And, in the process, on the track to what could wind up being one of the greatest individual seasons we’ve ever seen. Pick your all-in-one advanced stat of choice — player efficiency rating, win shares per 48 minutes, box plus-minus, estimated plus-minus, DARKO, LEBRON, etc. — and Gilgeous-Alexander is, for the fourth straight year, on pace for a career year.
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
SGA is scoring more points and delivering more assists per minute and per possession. He’s shooting 59.2% on 2-point shots, including 55% on midrange looks, and 41.1% on 3-point attempts, including 43.2% on pull-up triples — all of which would be career highs.
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He’s scoring 1.21 points per possession that he finishes himself after serving as the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll, 1.14 points per possession out of isolation, 1.47 points per possession attacking in transition, 1.22 points per possession going to work in the post, and 1.2 points per possession off drives to the basket, according to Synergy — all of which would be career highs. And when you factor in the possessions where he passes to a teammate who shoots, the Thunder are averaging 1.14 points per play out of SGA’s pick-and-rolls and isos, and 1.16 points per SGA post-up — all up from his MVP season.
Gilgeous-Alexander has notched the assist on 34.4% of his teammates’ baskets while he’s on the floor, and has coughed the ball up just 37 times in 703 minutes — an infinitesimal 6.8% turnover rate. Those would both be career-best marks, too. The only player in Stathead’s database to finish a full season with a usage rate as high and a turnover rate as low as what SGA’s posted thus far? Michael Jeffrey Jordan.
While the Thunder haven’t needed SGA’s services to close out many of their league-leading 13 double-digit wins, when they have found themselves in sticky situations, he’s been the best closer in the league. As my podcast partner Tom Haberstroh recently highlighted, despite playing in just nine “clutch” games — defined as contests in which the score is within five points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime — Gilgeous-Alexander leads the NBA in close-and-late scoring, with 80 points in 50 “clutch” minutes on 52.4% shooting. As NBA.com’s John Schuhmann notes, that is already more points than Shai scored in the clutch all of last season (67), and in those 50 minutes, he’s committed one turnover. (It’s no surprise, then, that Mike Beuoy’s model at Inpredictable projects SGA as the frontrunner for this season’s Clutch Player of the Year award.)
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No player to average 30 points per game has ever had a true shooting percentage (which factors in 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy) as high as SGA’s .674 mark. That means he’s on pace to produce the most efficient high-scoring season in NBA history, topping Stephen Curry’s 2015-16 season — a campaign in which Curry, fresh off a championship, won his second consecutive MVP trophy.
[Get more Thunder news: Oklahoma City team feed]
As you might remember, that year didn’t end quite the way that Curry and his Warriors — whose 73 regular-season wins remain the high-water mark that OKC is chasing — had hoped it would. And after getting taken the distance by Denver and Indiana en route to the 2025 title, Gilgeous-Alexander knows that what matters most is sticking the landing.
“I don’t think as a group we played our best basketball in that playoff run,” Gilgeous-Alexander told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon earlier this season. “And I don’t think as a player, I played my best basketball for the whole run. Granted, it’s basketball, it’s going to happen — but I had droughts, and there’s a reason why I had droughts. We had droughts as a team, and there’s a reason why we had droughts and meltdowns and things like that. We have to learn from those experiences and be better.”
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June’s a long way off; what happens before then is only preamble. All Gilgeous-Alexander can do between now and then is what he’s always done: just make the next play. Again, and again, and again.
“The things we want are so complicated and so hard to get,” Gilgeous-Alexander told MacMahon. “When you just focus on the simple things and the little things, you’ll look up and be there one day.”
Maybe the most interesting question on the board: When Gilgeous-Alexander finally does look up, just how far will he have come? Just how high in the ranks of NBA royalty will he have climbed?
“He can get better,” Daigneault told Amick. “… He seems to be kind of managing the game and manipulating the defense more often and more consistently than he ever has.”
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A version of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander that does those things better, more often and more consistently than he is right now … well, that sounds like one of the best players of all time. The highlights might never be all that loud. But then, it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch.
