The milestones keep coming for Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. With his first basket of Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night, Gilgeous-Alexander — the NBA’s reigning MVP — reached the 3,000-point mark for the season, including playoffs.
The milestone came on a 10-footer with 8:24 left in the opening quarter. He needed only two points to get there Sunday, after scoring 38 in Oklahoma City’s Game 1 loss to the Indiana Pacers on Thursday. Technically speaking, Gilgeous-Alexander had reached the 3,000-point threshold in Game 1, but as statistics accumulated during NBA Cup games don’t count toward season totals, nothing was official until Game 2’s first basket.
This is the 25th time in NBA history that a player has scored 3,000 points in a season. Michael Jordan did it 10 times, Wilt Chamberlain did it five and 10 other players — Bob McAdoo, Elgin Baylor, James Harden, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, Luka Doncic, Rick Barry, Shaquille O’Neal and now Gilgeous-Alexander — have done it once.
[Related: NBA Finals Game 2 takeaways: Thunder bounce back to even series 1-1]
Gilgeous-Alexander also is the fourth player to score that many points while also handing out at least 600 assists in the same season. Jordan did that three times, while Doncic and Harden have done so once.
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The 26-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander took home MVP honors – his first – for a season that saw him score an NBA-leading 32.7 points per game and 2,484 points. His 548 points scored in the playoffs this year also leads all players. He also averaged five rebounds and 6.4 assists per game, and has seen a boost to both of those figures – to 5.6 and 6.8 per game, respectively – in the playoffs. These performances pushed the Thunder to an NBA-best regular-season record of 68-14, as well as their first finals appearance since the 2011-2012 season.
The Thunder and Pacers are tied, 1-1, as the series heads back to Indiana for Wednesday’s Game 3.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
Oklahoma City Thunder
National Basketball Association
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