Some kids from the neighborhood were shooting hoops in my driveway the other day, so I asked them, “Who’s your favorite player?” One said LaMelo Ball. (His highlights speak to the youth. Apparently they do not show the bad shot selection on YouTube.) Another said Jayson Tatum. (This is the Boston area.)
“What about Stephen Curry?” I asked.
“Yeah,” they all said.
“And Shai Gilgeous-Alexander?”
“He’s a free-throw merchant,” one kid said, probably repeating something he had seen on social media.
This issue has reached the children, people. The children! It is a problem that needs solving, so we did.
Urban Dictionary defines a “free-throw merchant” as “a basketball player who relies entirely on free throws to score. Known for running into defenders before falling down and begging for foul calls.” The actual definition is probably a little softer. A free-throw merchant games the game, baiting defenders into contact and, more importantly, officials into blowing a whistle when the contact was his own doing.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s 606 free-throw attempts this season lead the league. Only Giannis Antetokounmpo (600) is within 99 free throws of Gilgeous-Alexander. James Harden (507) is third.
A week ago, this play was stirring what has really been an ongoing conversation over the past several weeks, as Gilgeous-Alexander inches closer to what betting lines are suggesting will be his first MVP:
Late in a five-point game between Gilgeous-Alexander’s Oklahoma City Thunder and the Detroit Pistons, he deftly used his left hand to pull the defender, Ausar Thompson, into his body, eliciting a shooting foul in the waning seconds of the shot clock. Originally whistled a defensive foul, the call was overturned and changed to an offensive foul upon review, as referees discovered Gilgeous-Alexander had fooled them.
So we decided to review every challenged call against the Thunder this season, just to see if this was a trend. Not only that, but we reexamined every one of Gilgeous-Alexander’s drives in late-game clutch situations, when the score was within five points in the final two minutes or overtime of any contest.
What we found is zero evidence that Gilgeous-Alexander is more of “a free-throw merchant” than any of your other favorite ball-dominant guards who drove their way into the MVP conversation over the years.
Coaches have challenged defensive foul calls on nine of Gilgeous-Alexander’s drives this season, and six of them have been overturned. Only the one against Detroit was whistled an offensive foul upon review.
“Hey, the majority of them were overturned,” you might say. “That is evidence of foul-baiting!”
Sure, you could think that. Or you could consider that Gilgeous-Alexander has logged a league-leading 1,325 drives this season, and on only nine of them (0.7%) did a coach dare to even challenge the call.
You could also see all six of those overturned calls for yourself:
Find one instance, other than the one against Detroit, in which Gilgeous-Alexander blatantly baited his opponent into a foul. I am not saying it does not happen. We are just here to say it is not an epidemic.
After all, you can also find an instance in which Gilgeous-Alexander was whistled for an offensive foul, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault challenged the call, and referees overturned it into a defensive foul. See:
And, yes, that foul was originally called against Gilgeous-Alexander.
Not convinced? We combed every last-two minute report, too. The NBA analyzes each reviewable call or non-call whenever games are within a handful of points in either direction in the final two minutes. You would think, if Gilgeous-Alexander is benefiting greatly from generous foul calls, at least one of them would have been rescinded late in a close game, when being a free-throw merchant comes in most handy.
Fortunately for those doing this research, the Thunder have played few clutch games this season, as they have dominated the campaign from its inception, so there were not many late-game situations to review. Unfortunately for the “SGA is a free-throw merchant” crowd, the only call involving him that was deemed incorrect by the NBA was this, an ultimately meaningless lane violation at the very end of an OKC loss:
As a whole, the Thunder have been within five points of their opponent in the final two minutes only 11 times all season, according to the NBA. In those games, just six calls were considered incorrect, per our review of the last two-minute reports, and three of them went against the Thunder. Compare that to the rest of the NBA, and the whistle for or against OKC is as neutral as it gets. Our Sleepless Nights Index:
Just because coaches are not challenging a lot of calls against Gilgeous-Alexander and the NBA is not conceding that its referees have missed calls against the Thunder superstar does not mean a ton of foul-baiting is not happening. There could, after all, be a grand conspiracy to benefit SGA’s MVP candidacy.
That would not explain Gilgeous-Alexander’s place in the annals of so-called free-throw merchants. His nine free-throw attempts a game rank 72nd among guards in NBA history, tied with Kobe Bryant’s 2008 MVP campaign. Oscar Robertson, Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Russell Westbrook and James Harden all have captured MVP awards while averaging more free throws per game than Gilgeous-Alexander’s nine.
In fact, among the 47 seasons in which a guard has averaged 30 or more points per game, Gilgeous-Alexander’s current free-throw rate (.416) — or the number of free throws he takes per shot attempt — ranks below the mean and median. His free-throw rate was higher in each of the previous two seasons.
So, at the very least, you have to admit that Gilgeous-Alexander is less of a free-throw merchant than he was before, when this conversation was not so ubiquitous that it infected our youth. You also have to concede that most every guard who has scored like SGA has also been a free-throw merchant. Or we can dispel this notion entirely and just accept that this is how potent scorers have always gamed the game.
