It’s because Luka foul baits the right way, I’d even say it’s classy. There’s something about Shai’s foul baiting that just feels thuggish in comparison.

what’s hilarious is this sub celebrating as if Finch saved basketball but SGA is literally still scoring and being as efficient as he always has. belt to ass rolls on. it’s almost as if it was never about the FTs at all

how is it “totally fine” when most of the comments/posts here is people saying that Luka is a fat flopping bum

The fact that Luka isn’t the MVP favorite right now and Lakers are not dominating the league helps a lot

Luka has been this subs golden boy for years. I feel it’s slowly changing but he gets the benefit of the doubt in every way

It’s a combination of a lot of things: Particularly how the Thunder have played defense in a manner that essentially no other team was allowed to play.

When you add that to the fact that on the other side, SGA gets all these calls for the EXACT plays that Minnesota mirrored right after and didn’t get anything, it’s a powder keg waiting to explode.

Remember: Finch didn’t go nuts because SGA was getting calls. Finch went berserk because he just saw Lu Dort wail both his arms on Julius Randle’s forearms and wasn’t even remotely close to the ball, point blank in front of a referee, and the ref went “I pretend I did not see.”

Fuck that.

Its the combo of what Shai gets to do, plus the OKC defense being able to do MMA on the other end of the floor. Minus Vanderbilt, the Lakers have much less of that going on

Luka doesn’t have Dort and Caruso hacking away for free at the other hand. Already pointed out many times.

Luka gets significantly more lol

Your comment ratio’d this post. This narrative that Luka doesn’t get foul baiting hate is so absurd I feel like some of you guys are blind lmao

If Luka played defense he would get more shit for it. Problem is the defense is generationally bad.

If the Lakers win a chip this year it will be front and center. OKC won a championship with preferential calls people are obviously going to talk about it. If they were getting these calls but were 0.250 nobody would care or notice.

SGA is all arms and legs compared to Luka.

They both draw fouls and exaggerate contact but Luka looks objectively less herky jerky when he does it

So SGA looks more “unnatural” in his motions even if they’re fundamentally doing the same thing

It’s certainly not racist in any way, I’ll tell ya that

Just my opinion but for Luka he waits for the defender to bait them into the contact due to his speed whereas Shai can attack at will but decides to *flop”.

The way both looked are also different so I guess that’s why.

Lakers things.

One comment i read here said that Luka foul baiting isnt as annoying as FTA because he has the decency to miss a bunch.

The perception is that OKC can maul people on defense, but when SGA feels a stiff breeze he gets free throws. The issues are absolutely related.

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Why would they not be related? Any time I’ve seen a discussion go that way the statement that’s always used it “How can Wallace be allowed to literally hold McConnell’s arm and get away with it but Shai gets to the line for this soft call”

I don’t know why you thought pointing out the MANY problems that people have with your team would be a good defense of ONE of them.

I mean they both contribute to the issue of the Thunder feeling bad to play against. You’re already the best team in the league and are benefitting from calls on both ends, so of course dudes online are going to mald about it

No no, you should

But the worst thing about it is the hypocrisy!

I think people are used to Shai going down very easy. I’ve been watching more Thunder games this year and it isn’t as bad as it was last year. You can tell he still does it but it’s not as dramatic.

In a game his team shot 50 FTs

They won the series so it’s not remembered by now but he had a rant after they lost to the Warriors game 1 last playoffs too.

He said they were basically mauling Gobert and sent the tapes to the league so they can review them lol

He was also fined by the league for criticizing the refs after a Suns game a couple of seasons ago as he thought they had too many free throws when they “usually don’t get a lot”

It’s just Finch.

Flair up, coward.

My unbiased biased opinion- I think the Wolves got a benefit of being allowed to play physical 2 years ago and was a huge asset to us in the playoffs up until the WCF. So last year in our OKC matchups we weren’t allowed to do that anymore, but OKC could. Meanwhile, Ant doesn’t get half the whistle SGA gets.

And this was just in the regular season.

Playoffs come, Wolves come out game 1 with more pace and momentum and then the fouls started. Jaden got 2 quick ones and it set the tone for the series. So when he sees it all happening again this year he snapped.

OKC is a really good team, SGA is a really good player, but they got gifted an incredible whistle last year after doing nothing relative to their opponents in the previous years playoffs. All of that can be true.

Signed- a bitter wolves fan who thought once Ant made a WCF he’d finally get a superstar whistle

Pretty sure it’s more than that, not “almost”.

Just checked, it’s at 20.3 per game lol

Yeah butler is super egregious too. He legit flies under the radar because he isn’t scoring a lot of points but shits crazy.

He doesn’t have the ball in his hands as often like Luka, Shai, or Harden so people don’t notice when he randomly gets the ball near the basket in a middle of a play and baits.

Whining and yelling at the refs is class for sure lol

Why is a post on shai necessary when hes not averaging many fts relative to his scoring this season?

If he wins another MVP / championship before he turns 30 it’ll start way sooner than people will like

Because they don’t watch games.

Shai for 35 Points, 5 Assists, 2 Steals, 1 Turnover with ⁶⁄₆ FTs

Social Media: “Yeah but he flopped on one of those shots so he’s just a no skill merchant”.

It’s brutal out there. What he’s doing is so ridiculously impressive but people just want to find reasons to hate.

The one true free throw grifter

He’s the actual goat of foul grifting. He’s like wilt chamberlains level of dominance there

Hes not a guard. In that case you could count Avdija who has a 0.59 one

I’m not saying the OKC whistle isn’t better than other teams but what I will say when the SGA hate threads are filled with 90% lakers fans I’m just sitting there rolling my eyes

One of the greatest non-dominant hand half court shooters of all time

Hell yea, love naw and this season has been a blast.

Finch was really lazy with NAW (and McDaniels before recently)

Because the physical style that’s applied to him comes on the perimeter. Throughout the majority of NBA history 90% of shooting fouls occur in the paint. The rest of the free throw attempts happen from the perimeter and outside the paint. Also with Citrus play style he shoots it from a long distance or open to where there is no contact. Then you have to take into account that to shoot regular free throws the team has to be in the penalty. So the defending team has 5 fouls to beat up Curry before he even attempts to shoot a free throw, so that’s 20 fouls. Then with the style that they played it’s easy to beat up on Steph because they haven’t had anyone to attack inside or cause the other team to use up their fouls. Majority of GSW players are outside shooters. Then the philosophy of getting great shots means that you can play less physical with everybody else.

Imo it’s a few things that kind of compound.

The first is just shot diet for shooting fouls. The majority of his FGAs are from 3 and you just draw less contact on 3s than on 2s. It could be slightly different this year, but historically it’s like ~1% foul rate on 3s and ~12% on 2s.

The next is that a lot of what people complain about is him getting fouled off-ball. The refs let more contact go off-ball and there are just less eyes on off-ball fouls. On those times when he’s getting slightly held or whatever, if he had the ball in his hands, he could exaggerate the contact and draw a foul.

This is more anecdotal, but it also seems like he shys away from contact when he does drive it. Like instead of going through a defender, he’s using his dribble to create space and being more shifty. So he’s not creating that contact to draw fouls.

And this is speculative, but he also has very short arms for NBA standards, so he can’t really attack defenders arms because they aren’t in reach. Like if you watch KD, that long wingspan is a weapon, if you are straight up, he’ll shoot over you, but if you bring your arms at like a 45 degree angle, now he can go through them and draw a foul.

I feel like Curry and Bron get a shit whistle as a sacrifice of other players on their team having amazing ones 😂 (Though feel like Brons been a bit better this year)

I wonder if it’s just play style for Curry?

“Foul baiting these days” - it’s always been like this, it’s not even new lol

The worst floppers in the NBA aren’t superstars. Ppl just forgot about the shit Marcus Smart used to do

33 games is a nothing burger /s

Denver and Indy playing handsy and physical? They’re blind, it didn’t happen actually! Okc gets a steal? Let’s put this in slowmo, post it 5 times on reddit, zoom in to remove context from the play, and pretend this physicality doesn’t happen on every steal across the league!

Come on now

lol

Ja Morant figured us out after 2 games

Playoffs are a different beast all together, we’re talking about this season. Last season, Silver changed the whistle mid season for the whole league.

The finals against Indy was insane. We were just mauling each other every other game. At the time it seemed like everyone was on the same page about the equal physicality of the series. But now that time has passed it’s turned into us being the only aggressors.