Shai explains why his cardinal rule is to get stops.
I’ve always preached that players should prioritize defense.
The reason why is that if you can prevent the other team (or player) from scoring, there’s no way they can outscore you (unless you’re just absolutely horrendous at scoring, in which case you wouldn’t have won anyway).
I often use the San Antonio Spurs and Phoenix Suns as examples of this argument.
However, there are some people who don’t believe me (young players, especially).
They think that defense should be secondary and the majority of their energy should be used on scoring as points on the board is what determines the game.
But the Oklahoma City Thunders’ Shai Gilgeous-Alexander recently made a statement that dismantles their belief and backs up mine.
During a post-game interview, he said that getting stops is the most important thing in a game because it hinders the opponent from getting more points than you.
”I was taught from a very young age that if you get stops -and this is a little bit dramatic, but this is how I was taught- but if you get a stop every possession, the worst that can happen is the game ends in a tie. But if you let them score every possession, you can still lose. So, I’m always thinking ‘get stops’ if I’m trying to win.”
Shai, however, isn’t all talk. He backs up his words on the hardwood.
The Thunder are currently third in the Western Conference and one of the reasons why is that their defense is phenomenal.
They’re fifth in defensive rating with 112. Additionally, they hold their opponents to 113.6 points per game, making them the second toughest team to play against as the points differential (or +/-) is 7.1 points.
The team that has the largest points difference is the Boston Celtics with 9.4.
Individually, Shai is averaging career-highs in steals and blocks, with 2.2 and 0.9, respectively, as he holds opponents to a roughly 41 percent field-goal percentage.
The only players who are more of a pest than him are the Celtics’ Jrue Holiday and OKC’s Chet Holmgren, his running mate.
The Thunder are playing well and have a good chance of making some loud noise in the playoffs and it’s all because of their tight defense (which many times leads to easy buckets on the other end).
