{"id":144181,"date":"2025-06-10T15:06:54","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T19:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/?p=144181"},"modified":"2025-06-10T15:06:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T19:06:54","slug":"sga-new-face-of-nba-thunder-finals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/2025\/06\/10\/sga-new-face-of-nba-thunder-finals\/","title":{"rendered":"SGA Can Earn This Title With The Thunder Winning The Finals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander<\/a> is coming off an elite performance in the Western Conference Finals, where he won the MVP. He has carried over that success in the first two games of the finals<\/a>. SGA has scored the most points<\/a> in the first two games of a Finals debut, beating Allen Iverson<\/a>. With the series tied 1-1 and shifting to Indiana, the Thunder will need to win on the road to emerge victorious in the Finals. However, if SGA can lead the Thunder to a championship, he should become the front-runner for the new face of the NBA when LeBron James<\/a> and Steph Curry<\/a> retire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging<\/a> 36 points per game with 5.0 rebounds, 5.5 assists, and 3.5 steals in the NBA Finals. He has backed up his MVP award in every which way in these playoffs. However, if the Thunder win the Finals, people still might not want to call him the front-runner for the face of the league for two reasons: he is in a small market and he is not an American basketball player. Let\u2019s dive into why SGA should become the new face of the NBA if the Thunder win the championship, regardless of those concerns.<\/span><\/p>\n

SGA Can Earn This Title With The Thunder Winning The Finals\u00a0 <\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

The Historic Season SGA is Having\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

Gilgeous-Alexander has been dominating the league for the last three seasons. He has averaged 30 or more points in that span, a feat that only Michael Jordan<\/a> has accomplished<\/a>. However, this season has been different as he won the MVP and led the Thunder to the Finals. If he can win the Finals and earn Finals MVP, he will join an elite company in many different areas. A company that is made up of former faces of the league.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

SGA will join Jordan and Magic Johnson<\/a> as the only guards to ever win MVP and Finals MVP<\/a>. In addition, he will be the first player since LeBron James<\/a> to accomplish this. Gilgeous-Alexander also led the league in scoring and will join Jordan as the only guard to do that while winning the championship<\/a>. He could even break the streak of winning MVP and not winning a championship in the same year. Finally, his resume will speak for itself: 3X All-Star, 3X first-team All-NBA, a regular season MVP<\/a>, Western Conference Finals MVP, one ring, one scoring title, and a Finals MVP. All of this at the age of 26, and he can build off of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Thunder Are Going to Be Good For a While<\/b><\/h3>\n

To be the face of the NBA, you need to be consistently good for several years in a row and compete for a championship regularly. The Thunder are set up perfectly to be a dominant team for the next decade. They are already the second youngest team to reach the Finals and will only get better. They have a young big three that play extremely well together in Shai, Jalen Williams<\/a>, and Chet Holmgren<\/a>. Finally, they have a ton of draft assets to replenish lost talent. In an era where we have seen seven different champions in the last seven years, counting this season, the Thunder have the best chance of ending that streak.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other players like Nikola Jokic<\/a>, Giannis Antetokounmpo<\/a>, and Joel Embiid<\/a>, who were in line to become the new faces of the league, never could. One reason for that is they haven’t been able to reach the Finals yet. The other is that their team wasn\u2019t advancing to the Finals consistently enough. Jokic and Giannis have only been to the Finals once and haven’t gotten back since. However, unlike those teams, the Thunder are set up for better long-term success.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Why The 2 Reasons Shouldn\u2019t Matter\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

The two big reasons why SGA wouldn’t be the face of the league shouldn\u2019t matter. LeBron was the face of the league in Cleveland, which is another small-market team. Kevin Durant<\/a> was well-known while playing on the Thunder, so why can\u2019t Gilgeous-Alexander be?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Additionally, the four best players in the NBA are not from America. Jokic, Shai, Giannis, and Luka Doncic<\/a> are arguably the four best players in basketball, yet none of them were born in the United States. The last couple of years, the NBA has been dominated by international talent, and this trend will likely only get worse as the years go by. The league needs to do a better job of marketing its young talent better and it starts with Shai. If the league can market SGA better, he will have no problem becoming the new face of the NBA, as he has the game and a unique personality to meet those standards.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Last Word\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

The Thunder have earned playoff road wins before. They will need to do so again in order to win this year’s championship. If the Thunder win the Finals, SGA will have one of the best guard seasons in NBA history since Magic and Jordan. The league is searching for someone to take the mantle from LeBron and Curry, and their answer could be right in front of them with SGA.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Kyle Terada-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is coming off an elite performance in the Western Conference Finals, where he won the MVP. He has carried over that success in the first two games of the finals. SGA has scored the most points in the first two games of a Finals debut, beating Allen Iverson. With the series tied 1-1 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5171,"featured_media":144213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1608,11,62,22],"tags":[4292,4609,38,755,607,1489,48],"class_list":["post-144181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basketball","category-pacers","category-nba","category-thunder","tag-chet-holmgren","tag-jalen-williams","tag-lebron-james","tag-magic-johnson","tag-michael-jordan","tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","tag-stephen-curry"],"modified_by":"Jordan Pagkalinawan","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144181"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144216,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144181\/revisions\/144216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}