There’s nobody in the NBA you’d rather be right now than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The man just wrapped up a historic season by leading the Thunder to the NBA title, their first since moving to OKC in 2008. He won his first scoring title, his first MVP award, and his first Finals MVP. There’s a very easy argument to make that he’s the best basketball player in the world at this moment in time.
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However, that doesn’t make him the face of the league, a point which Paul Pierce, Keyshawn Johnson, and Joy Taylor drove home to longtime NBA reporter Ric Bucher on the latest episode of Speak on FS1.
While Bucher made the argument in his favor, he simply was not convincing in trying to defend his take that SGA is now the face of the NBA.
It all started when Taylor raised the question to Bucher, who responded with, “I think he has, by default. Simply because I look at where we are right now, and the year that he had. Who else would I look to? Unless you’re gonna say there is no face of the league, that we’re just faceless right now.”
Not one to take an argument he felt was without merit, Pierce immediately shot back, asserting LeBron James still held the title. According to him, no matter what LeBron does, even if it’s as simple as dropping his phone and breaking it, he will have made the news.n
Unfortunately, the crowd-pleasing rationalization wasn’t enough to convince Bucher. “We’ve turned a page. That’s just because [LeBron] is polarizing … The NBA is in sad shape if LeBron James is still the face of the league,” he claimed.
However, despite Bucher’s insistence, the facts back Pierce up. Despite being in his 22nd NBA season, LeBron’s jersey sales were still third in the league, behind only Steph Curry and his new teammate Luka Doncic. Before this season, LeBron or Steph had held the top spot on that list every year since 2012. SGA finished ninth on that list.
LeBron and Steph will eventually give way to the newer generation, but they still reign supreme as the game’s most popular players, even if SGA was the best player on the best team.
Because, unfortunately, it is simply not enough. If being the best was all it took, there would have been seven different faces of the league in the past seven seasons, courtesy of the age of parity delivering a new champ every year.
Was Jayson Tatum the face of the league when the Celtics won it all last year? If the answer to that is no, then it’s also no for Shai. Tatum is the perfect rebuttal to Bucher’s argument, because like Shai, he’s a total pro and an All-NBA talent, but doesn’t have the exciting personality to back Bucher’s argument. And that’s OK!
Bucher said, “When I close my eyes right now and I think about the face of the NBA, I think of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander,” to which Pierce reminded him of a little phenomenon called recency bias. “Because it just happened last night,” he noted, almost chuckling.
Bucher seemed to take it as a sign of disrespect towards SGA that he wouldn’t get that designation, but that’s not it at all. It doesn’t diminish what he accomplished or demean his game. It simply takes more to be called the face of the NBA.
LeBron’s Lakers led the league with a whopping 39 nationally televised games, nearly 50% of their entire schedule. SGA’s Thunder had 25, tied for the 10th-most.
The point that Bucher misses is that if the face of the league were simply the guy who had the best season most recently, there wouldn’t be a panel of experts arguing its merits. Fans simply look at the box scores, see who won the awards, and that would be that. It doesn’t make for a particularly compelling analysis.
SGA is a phenomenal player, and he earned every accolade he received this year. But until ‘King James’ decides to hang up his sneakers for the final time, this is still his league.
