Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s Cease and Desist Letter to Underdog Will Only Reignite Flop Conversation

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder are one win away from eliminating the Spurs and advancing to their second straight NBA Finals. If it finishes off San Antonio, Oklahoma City will face the Knicks while the two-time MVP's every move on the court will be under a microscope.

The narrative around Gilgeous-Alexander since his ascension to superstardom in Oklahoma City has increasingly focused on his ability to get to the free-throw line. Or, in more colloquial terms, his flopping, foul-baiting and “unethical” basketball.

But this is one of those cases in which the eye test and the analytics seem to agree, even if he's never led the league in free-throw attempts. With so much attention on every game, not a day goes by where we don't get an absurd collection of SGA lowlights of him hitting the ground. And he sure does hit the ground a lot. While he doesn't literally fall down on every single shot attempt, he does hit the ground much more often than other high-profile superstars, according to research by Yahoo's Tom Haberstroh.

With all that in mind, Underdog Sports, a fantasy sports and prediction market company, came up with a clever twist on a classic board game and decided to put SGA on a new version of Operation. That game, titled "Unethical Hoops" (and not “Floperation” for some reason), was promoted by SGA's Olympic teammate, Dillon Brooks, last week.

Unethical Hoops, coming soon… pic.twitter.com/ANdHV4JTjr
— Underdog (@Underdog) May 21, 2026

That video was posted on May 21. According to The Athletic, SGA's camp quickly responded, sending a cease and desist letter the very next day. Per The Athletic:

Eric Fishman of law firm ArentFox Schiff LLP, representing Gilgeous-Alexander, asked Underdog to "permanently cease and desist from any and all use of Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander’s NIL in any and all media, including but not limited to your website (including the Unethical Hoops Website), apps, social media accounts, digital marketing and advertisements, promotional emails, push notifications, affiliate or influencer placements, and any physical goods including but not limited to the board game advertised on the Unethical Hoops Website.”

They have also asked that "all board games be destroyed," which makes you wonder how many Underdog has actually produced at this point. According to the Unethical Hoops website (which would have been an incredible name for an NBA blog 15 years ago), you can still enter the sweepstakes and "winners" will be announced Friday. So at the very least, Unethical Hoops doesn't sound like something you'll find on the shelves at Target, which will only make it more valuable. Especially now that SGA's camp is suing to make sure it never sees the light of day.

This may have been a big misstep by Gilgeous-Alexander if he really wants this to go away. He's put the Streisand effect on the game to the point where it has now risen from a April Fool's Day prank that might be mentioned in passing and turned it into the thing that his lawyers want to fight. Anyone who missed the game will probably hear about the lawyers getting involved.

If you were going to make the SGA Operation cease and desist letter the case on a future season of Jury Duty, everyone who wasn't dismissed would think they were being pranked by the producers of that show (or Anthony Davis).

Anyway, until SGA starts standing on his own two feet more often, this will continue to be a topic of conversation. Entering Game 6 against San Antonio, Gilgeous-Alexander has made more free throws (120) than field goals (114) this postseason. If you want to call that a small sample size, that's fine, but he also came close to doing that over an entire season in 2022-23 when he made a career-high 699 free throws during the regular season while draining 704 field goals. During the team's title run last year, he also had more free throws made than field goals made over the 23 postseason games.

That's why you're going to keep seeing supercuts of Gilgeous-Alexander throwing his body around after every game and things like the team's most egregious flops of the postseason are going to continue to be written about.

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