Yeah, SGA flopped nine times in WCF Game 2. Nine. Tom Haberstroh counted them. It’s documented. It’s real.
And I don’t care.
I mean that. I genuinely do not care if what he’s doing is flopping or genius or some beautiful hybrid of both. What I care about — what nobody seems to want to talk about — is that the NBA spent fourteen years building a game where falling down strategically is MORE valuable than actually shooting the basketball. And now we’re mad at the guy who cracked the code.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Here’s where this started. The league introduced an anti-flopping rule in 2012-13. Fines starting at five grand. Very scary. Very enforceable. They called approximately 26 in-game flopping technicals in all of 2023-24 — the first year the live flop-tech rule even existed. Twenty-six. In an entire season. (The NBA plays 1,230 regular season games, just so we’re all on the same page about how much they cared.)
Then 2021 happened. James Harden was jump-stepping into defenders, hooking arms, turning a foul draw into performance art. The league banned “non-basketball moves.” Harden himself admitted he was the target. His free throw attempts dropped from roughly ten a game to 4.8 his first season under the new rule.
So the league patched the Harden exploit.
And then SGA just… found the next one. Except instead of hooking arms, he gets into his gather, absorbs contact on the way up, and goes down. Clean. Legal. Devastating. He fell fifteen times across the first two WCF games combined. Haberstroh tracked 1,300-plus postseason shots from elite scorers and found SGA falls on 17.4% of all his attempts — nearly four times Wembanyama’s rate.
https://twitter.com/RealJayWilliams/status/2057853771149877505
On fouled shots specifically? SGA falls 51.4% of the time. Fifty-one. No other tracked player breaks 30%. He fell more on fouled shots in this series than Brunson, Mitchell, AND Wembanyama combined.
Reggie Miller said you don’t win back-to-back MVPs by flopping. Technically true! Also kind of misses the point, Reggie. You win MVPs by being the best scorer in the league, and being the best scorer in the league right now means mastering the exact skill the NBA’s rulebook made into an optimal strategy.
Wembanyama’s out here talking about “pure and ethical basketball.” Sir, your league has not fined a single player for flopping this season. Not one.
The Spurs fans chanted “flopper” at SGA in Game 3. Thunder won 123-108. What the Thunder bench did to the Spurs in Game 3 made the flopping debate feel kind of quaint, actually.
SGA’s response to the chants? “It does nothing. Doesn’t fuel me, doesn’t discourage me.” Which is the most devastating thing you can say. The guy isn’t even bothered. He’s executing this WCF rivalry that is going to define the next decade while we’re stuck arguing about whether falling down counts as cheating.
It counts as winning. The NBA made it count. That’s the story.
The league had 14 years of anti-flopping rules and chose, repeatedly, not to enforce them with any teeth. SGA read the rulebook, saw what the league actually punishes (almost nothing), and became the best in the world at the gray area they left open. He’s not the villain here.
The rule is.
