ESPN Fantasy Predicts Thunder Players’ Stats for Next Season
With the NBA season now right around the corner, fantasy players will soon begin drafting their NBA fantasy teams, and ESPN is a popular outlet for players.
One thing ESPN does ahead of the season is predict the stats for the upcoming season to help guide players through the NBA draft.
Of course, injuries and roster issues could always affect these predictions, but let’s take a look at the Oklahoma City Thunder players’ projected stats.
The most popular option to look at for the Thunder is and should be Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He’s put up some incredible statlines and has ended the last two seasons with averages right around where you might see an All-Star at. ESPN projects Gilgeous-Alexander to score a full point per game more, and finish the season at 25.5 points per contest. Other than a slight efficiency improvement, there are no other real jumps they project Gilgeous-Alexander to have.
Josh Giddey is another fun player that could be interesting in the box score this season. The 6-foot-8 point guard (or 6-foot-9, depending on who you ask) has the ability to rebound over smaller matchups, and his passing is amongst the best in the league. By the time the season starts, Giddey will have just turned 20-years-old, making a big jump even more likely. ESPN’s projection leaves Giddey averaging 14.0 points, 8.4 rebounds and 8.0 assists per game. These averages would be an incredible jump for Giddey. Of course, with the help of Chip Engelland, his ceiling in the scoring department could be even higher.
Luguentz Dort, who’s taken a leap each season now, is projected to take a slight 0.4 points per game jump, which is quite surprising considering his track history. On the bright side, they also project Dort will take a slight efficiency jump. His efficiency could easily take a bigger jump than the one percent jump they predict, because last season was his first season scoring at the volume that he did.
The third-best fantasy player for the Thunder isn’t projected to be Dort, but rather Darius Bazley. ESPN projects him to score 12.9 points and pull down 7.0 rebounds per contest. This would mean Bazley’s projection is to score 2.1 more points per game season-over-season.
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