Why the Oklahoma City Thunder Are a Deserving Villain |
If you have been following this year’s NBA playoffs and, like me, prefer to do so in the company of your fellow armchair-pundits on social media platforms like X and Reddit, then you have probably been exposed to the groaning of basketball fans who feel that the game has become unwatchable. This, of course, does not stop any of us from watching it; sports fans, since time immemorial, reserve the right to kvetch about that which we love. And most of us advocate for “ethical hoops,” the triumph of a pure and aesthetically uncompromised brand of basketball rooted in talent, skill, and integrity.
The greatest threat to ethical hooping, if the discourse is any indication, are the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the weaponized shoulders of their star and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the defending NBA champions have mastered a maximally efficient and spiritually corrosive style of basketball predicated, at least in part, on baiting credulous referees into calling fouls on the opposing team. One way they do this is by flopping, the umbrella term for the parade of pratfalls and head-jerks intended to exaggerate the appearance of defensive contact when shooting. The floppers of yore had the luxury of degrading the sport in an era of less intense scrutiny. Not so with SGA, whose antics have become the cause célèbre of basketball fans everywhere, from the court-side seats in San Antonio, where........