The NBA has seen its popularity decline in recent years, for any number of obvious reasons.
Chief among them is that the league fully embraced left-wing politics, particularly around the 2020 season, with many prominent players and coaches joining in. There were league-wide initiatives, statements and public displays of support for a particular viewpoint.
Unsurprisingly, that turned off plenty of fans. And ratings and interest dropped as a result. But it’s not just politics that’s hurt the league’s position in the sporting landscape. It’s the rapid proliferation of predictable basketball and maybe most importantly, obvious flopping.
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Perhaps the poster child for the flopping phenomenon is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. SGA, as he’s more commonly known, is the reigning MVP. He led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA Finals in 2024-2025, closing out the Indiana Pacers to win a championship. And he’s two wins away from a return trip, as of Tuesday afternoon, locked in a tied series with the San Antonio Spurs.
SGA is clearly an extremely talented player with an obvious skill set. He’s also known for using, shall we say, the court and officiating to his advantage. And some new “research” from Yahoo! Sports’ Tom Haberstroh attempted to answer whether perception about SGA’s flopping matches reality.
In a series of articles, Haberstroh tracked how often SGA has hit the court thus far in the NBA postseason, with the theory being that falling during shot attempts is the most clear-cut method to emphasize contact and most importantly, draw whistles.
And sure enough, Gilgeous-Alexander falls during field-goal tries more than his peers. A lot more.
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Haberstroh’s research was thorough, in that he found that SGA fell on 20 of his 187 field-goal tries through the first few rounds of the playoffs. That’s 10.7%. Other guards he tracked included James Harden, Jalen Brunson and Donovan Mitchell. Along with seeming “flopping” critic and emerging NBA star Victor Wembanyama. Harden, who has a reputation for flopping himself, hit the court on 19 of 219 attempts, or 8.7%. Brunson and Mitchell were also behind at 7.9% and 7.6%. Wembanyama? He fell just once, for a 0.6% rate. And didn’t get a foul call to show for it.
So how often does SGA’s propensity for falling benefit him? Quite a bit, it turns out. He got foul calls on 37 shots in the postseason, falling on a whopping 19 of them. Over 50% of the time when fouled in a shooting attempt, he falls to the court. That’s wild. And for some perspective, it’s by far the highest rate of any similar player in the postseason and, Haberstroh points out, “he has fallen more on his fouled shots (19 times) than Brunson, Mitchell and Wembanyama combined (17).”
Incredibly, through that dataset, he’d fallen on 17.4% of all shot attempts.
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Haberstroh updated his findings on Tuesday ahead of Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals, and found that SGA has actually become more prone to falling as the postseason has progressed. He went from 11 in the first round, to 13 in the second round, to 22 thus far against the Spurs.
And it’s paying off. He’s now drawn a foul 23 out of 46 times that he’s hit the court in the playoffs, or 50% of the time. That’s a remarkable advantage for someone as good as SGA on free throws. It’s also an outlier compared to those similar players. Brunson gets the same call just 20.8% of the time, Mitchell is 21.2% and Harden was 40.6% before being eliminated.
So thanks to Haberstroh’s research, we can at least confirm that it’s not a figment of imagination to say that SGA is frequently falling. And more importantly, getting rewarded for it at remarkable rates. It’s possible, of course, that not all of these falls are purposeful flops. But there are plenty of videos going around showing that he’s not shy at creating contact, or emphasizing it for effect.
That’s not fun to watch and it’s not exciting or quality basketball, particularly on the biggest stage. But it’s an all-too-common part of the modern NBA, because it works. More so for SGA than even other stars. No wonder people aren’t watching.
