Maybe the most controversial part of Oklahoma City Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s game is his penchant for drawing fouls and earning himself trips to the free-throw line.
Gilgeous-Alexander has taken 9.2 free throws per game so far in the 2025 NBA Playoffs, and there are fans who are skeptical about his approach and whether refs should be rewarding him with free throws as often as they do.
But former NBA forward Richard Jefferson recently recited an interesting point about the whole topic that he heard from the horse’s mouth. Gilgeous-Alexander told him that when he was getting to the line on a very frequent basis with a Thunder team that ended up as the No. 10 seed in the Western Conference in the 2022-23 campaign, “no one cared.”
However, now that the Thunder are one of the NBA’s elite teams, folks are all up in arms about his free-throw attempts, he says.
Richard Jefferson says SGA told him that no one cared when he was taking 11 free throws per game on a 10th seed, but now that he’s taking 9 a game and sending everyone’s favorite player home, people suddenly care 🥶
(🎥 @RoadTrippinPod / @Weston22518)
— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) May 22, 2025
“He’s like, ‘When I wasn’t sending their best, favorite player home, when I wasn’t sending their team home, then no one cared that I was shooting 11 free throws a night and scoring this amount of points,'” Jefferson said as he relayed Gilgeous-Alexander’s comments. “‘Now that I’m doing it and I’m averaging nine free throws, the whole world is exploding about it.’ He’s like, ‘I love it. It just means they’re thinking about me.'”
In the 2022-23 regular season, Gilgeous-Alexander averaged a career-high 10.9 free-throw attempts per contest, but he still didn’t lead the league in that stat. Milwaukee Bucks star big man Giannis Antetokounmpo led the league with 12.3 tries per game, while Philadelphia 76ers star big man Joel Embiid was in second at 11.7.
While drawing fouls and capitalizing on free-throw attempts are parts of Gilgeous-Alexander’s offensive arsenal, his knack for getting to the line is just a small part of what makes him one of the premier offensive players in the NBA.
After all, Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging nearly 30 points per game in the 2025 NBA Playoffs, and only a portion of his points (around eight per game) have come from the charity stripe.
Perhaps Gilgeous-Alexander will remind fans that he doesn’t need to take a gaudy number of free throws to score a lot of points in the Thunder’s Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals versus the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Thunder can go up 2-0 and be just two wins away from punching their ticket to the NBA Finals with a win on Thursday.
