Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wants you to believe he gave something up, but he took control, and calling it respect is the smartest spin move of his season.
In Oklahoma City's 96-84 win over Denver, SGA had a miserable shooting night: 6-for-19, scoreless in the first half except for a couple of free throws. With 1:43 left and the Thunder up big, he started walking back onto the floor, saw that Denver had emptied its bench, and turned around. His streak of 141 straight games scoring at least 20 points ended at 17. Asked about it afterward, he said he saw Denver sub out and figured the Thunder should do the same. "You always treat the game with respect," he said. His coach, Mark Daigneault, admitted he wanted no part of that decision: "I would have left him. I was going to leave him."
Daigneault, the man actually running the Thunder, wanted his superstar to stay in and chase the record. SGA said no. He overrode his coach to decide, alone, how his own 141-game run would end. He chose to end it on a clean shot he controlled, with a tidy quote ready for the press conference, rather than let it get stuffed into garbage time against a Nuggets team that had already waved the white flag. It's a two-time MVP protecting his own story.
Rating
RatingJokic didn't go off. He shot 5-for-19 and finished with a modest 13 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists. There's no version of this game where SGA was bowing out gracefully in deference to a monster Jokic performance, because the monster performance never happened. Denver's offense sputtered for three quarters because its best player couldn't find the basket either, and Jamal Murray, Christian Braun and Cameron Johnson combined for next to nothing. If anyone outplayed SGA that night, it was Denver's defense, specifically Braun, who spent three quarters doing exactly what the record books will now never credit him for.
Denver hung around for three quarters. It's tempting to chalk the result up to calls going OKC's way rather than a real gap between the two teams, but the box score says otherwise: a team shooting this badly on both ends, Jokic included, isn't getting cheated out of a win it earned. It just hasn't found itself a game into the season. This was the Nuggets' opener, one data point early in a long year.
RTGDon't buy the respect framing. SGA ended his own streak, against his coach's wishes, in a game where the guy he was supposedly honoring shot himself into a nondescript line. This is a star writing his own ending and asking everyone to applaud the generosity of it.
