One of the NBA’s most exciting teams is the Oklahoma City Thunder and Torontonian Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a rising force. Can he be the NBA’s scoring leader this season?
There is a lot of anticipation surrounding the Oklahoma City Thunder as we enter the 2023-2024 NBA campaign. A lot of that has to do with their rise in the latter half last season, a run that allowed them to make it to the second play-in game. A 40-42 record might not be much to shout about, but they were 24-58 the prior season and not even close to sniffing the play-in.
The interest for OKC is so palpable north of the border that they were part of the NBA’s pre-season Canada Series. They played the Detroit Pistons in Montreal just a couple of weeks ago. That’s right, a Canada Series game didn’t even feature the Toronto Raptors (it was sold on the popularity of Montreal-born Luguentz Dort, to be fair).
The team will go as far as Ontario’s Shai-Gilgeous Alexander will take them. It’s as simple as that. He was sensational in 2022-2023. Can he replicate that success and lead the NBA in scoring this year? He’s currently pinned in third place at +400.
Check out our NBA odds for plenty of basketball action.
Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
The 25-year-old from Toronto has been on a lot of people’s radar for some time. Drafted ahead of the 2018 season by the Clippers, played all 82 games that year, registering 26.5 minutes a night, but only averaging 10.8 points.
He was quickly dealt to Oklahoma City, where his career has never been the same since. Injuries, of which he’s suffered a few, haven’t deterred the improvement of his play. His game average for points immediately increased to 19.0 in 2019-2020 and has never been lower than 23.7 since. He’s also assisting on anywhere from 5.5 to 5.9 buckets per game over the past three campaigns. And knowing that he’ll corral 4.8 to 5.0 rebounds is reassuring as well.
It was his 2022-2023 that stood out. With 31.4 points on average through 68 games, he was in contention to win the NBA scoring title. That eventually went to Joel Embiid (33.1) but consider the company he was in as the fourth-best scorer. Embiid, Luka Doncic (32.4), Damian Lillard (32.2), Giannis Antetokounmpo (31.1), Jayson Tatum (30.1), and Stephen Curry (294) just to name a few. Fun fact, four of those players, Gilgeous-Alexander included, were born outside the U.S. The NBA is really going global.
He Can Do It with Help from His Friends
Stars make the NBA, but even they need a little help from their friends. To that effect, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has excellent teammates on the offensive side of the ball.
Fellow Canadian Luguentz Dort averaged 13.7 points, 4.6 rebounds and 2.1 assists. Australian Josh Giddey tallied 16.6 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 6.2 assists. Forward Jalen Williams put up 14.1 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 3.3 assists. As a collective, OKC wasn’t a superb assist team, averaging only 24.4 per tilt, nowhere near the top of the NBA (21st). Individually they played very well, even if it resulted in allowing the opposition to score a lot on them (19th defensively).
It’s a fine line between a roster’s star taking it upon themselves to do as much as possible while allowing their teammates to lend the biggest helping hand. In 2022-2023, it looked as if the Thunder were on their way to finding that balance, hence Gilgeous-Alexander’s meteoric rise while his supporting cast also put up solid figures.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s Rise to the Top
Can he improve upon last year and win the NBA scoring title? From a numbers standpoint, 2022-2023 was an outlier. He never averaged over 30 points a game in a single season. It also wasn’t his first or second year in the league. It was his fifth, meaning he was either a beast lying in wait for four years or he simply had an exceptionally good year but is usually a 22-to-25-points scorer.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with netting 22 to 25 points a night. Those are great figures and any team would love to have that consistency on its roster. But that’s not the prop under discussion. The question is can Shai Gilgeous-Alexander lead the NBA in scoring?
It seems unlikely. Not because he lacks the talent or the good teammates. More so because his rivals to the throne have hit stratospheric numbers consistently for several seasons. It feels like a lot to ask for him to be better than guys like Doncic, Tatum, Giannis, Curry, Lillard, Kevin Durant and the like all over again.
