{"id":110909,"date":"2025-08-01T18:19:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T18:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/110909\/"},"modified":"2025-08-01T18:19:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T18:19:12","slug":"thunder-are-sitting-on-a-breakout-player-that-the-rest-of-the-nba-is-ignoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/110909\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder are sitting on a breakout player that the rest of the NBA is ignoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

It goes without saying that the OKC Thunder already have their stars soundly in place<\/a>. <\/p>\n

With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, and Chet Holmgren leading the charge and officially locked in for the foreseeable future, the ball club is more than set in the top-shelf talent department.<\/p>\n

However, hiding in the shadows is a budding star in Cason Wallace, who not only played like one of the team’s most dominant players during this past title-winning season, but could very realistically be on the verge of breaking out onto the scene during a pivotal 2025-26 campaign.<\/p>\n

Cason Wallace should be gunning for career-best campaign with Thunder<\/p>\n

Though the lion’s share of attention and credit for Oklahoma City’s successes last season was directed to their Big Three, Wallace was quietly one of the biggest difference-makers on the team, particularly on the defensive end.<\/p>\n

Through 68 games played, the sophomore ranked fifth<\/a> in the entire association in total deflections, sixth in total steals, and placed within the 95th percentile<\/a> in defensive estimated plus\/minus while averaging 8.4 points, 3.4 rebounds, and 2.5 assists a night on 47.4 percent shooting from the floor and 35.6 percent shooting from deep.<\/p>\n

Selected 10 overall in the 2023 NBA Draft, heading into the league, the hope was always to see Wallace blossom into a bona fide stud on the hardwood. Coming in, many seemed rather confident in comparing his game to that of future Hall of Fame guard Jrue Holiday.<\/p>\n

Despite being on easily one of the deepest rosters in the game and a part of perhaps the deepest guard rotation, the Kentucky product has resoundingly established himself as a staple player, as he saw the fourth-most minutes last year among his Thunder peers and tied for the sixth-most total minutes played during their championship run in the 2025 NBA Playoffs.<\/p>\n

Now heading into his third go-around in OKC, Wallace finds himself encroaching on rookie-extension eligibility, so the expectation should be that the guard is looking to put his best foot forward in the hopes of securing a lucrative, long-term deal from the organization.<\/p>\n

The key to accomplishing such a feat will likely be him keeping up this same level of play and energy on the less glamorous side of the ball while simultaneously growing his craft as a catch-and-shoot threat from long-range (boasted a pedestrian 37.0 percent clip on such attempts last year) and as an overall self-initiator (just 30.2 percent of his made field goals came unassisted).<\/p>\n

Should he improve upon both these elements of his game, not only should he have a lofty new extension virtually locked in, but he could realistically cement his status as the successor to potential flight-risk Lu Dort<\/a> as the club’s primary two-guard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It goes without saying that the OKC Thunder already have their stars soundly in place. With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":110910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1260,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-110909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-nba","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114954893057031610","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}