The Oklahoma City Thunder are on their way to the Western Conference Finals for the first time since the 2015-16 season after an emphatic, 125-93, Game 7 win against the Denver Nuggets on Sunday afternoon. They will take on the Minnesota Timberwolves as they search for their first NBA Finals appearance since the 2011-12 season.
The star of Sunday’s win for the Thunder was the same as it has been all season — point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
The 2025 MVP finalist was absolute money in crunch time, scoring a game-high 35 points in only 36 minutes of action.
He was borderline unstoppable.
He not only put up the points, he did so with incredible efficiency, shooting 12-of-19 from the field, including 3-of-4 from three-point range.
It was also the third consecutive game in the series where he topped the 30-point mark, going for 31, 32 and 35 over Games 5, 6 and 7 of the series. He did so while shooting better than 60% from the field and better than 54% from behind the line.
He was not only the Thunder’s best player in all three games, he was the best player on the floor and out-dueled Denver’s MVP finalist, Nikola Jokic. And that’s not to say that Jokic was bad or a non-factor for the Nuggets.
It’s also not just the fact that Gilgeous-Alexander was better.
It’s that while his production and efficiency progressively improved over the final three games of the series, Jokic saw his performance progressively regress. He went from 44 points in Game 5, down to 29 in Game 6, down to 20 points in Game 7 on Sunday. It was his second-lowest point output of the series, topping only his 17-point performance in Denver’s 149-106 Game 2 loss (in which Jokic logged just 32 minutes).
When you get into a Game 7, it can often come down to which team’s best player is going to have their best.
On Sunday, it was the Thunder and Gilgeous-Alexander that had it.
