The Oklahoma City Thunder have a reputation for getting all the foul calls after their jaunt to the 2025 NBA championship last season. That hasn’t necessarily been true so far to start the new year: the Thunder only rank No. 16 in the league in free throw rate, and no one on the team other than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander even averages four free throw attempts per game.
Bam Adebayo called for softest NBA foul possible vs. Thunder even after review
How is this a foul?
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
Facts usually don’t matter when it comes to forming NBA narratives, and the Thunder’s reputation is only going to get more ingrained after they were on the receiving end of a ridiculous foul call on Sunday against the Miami Heat. Heat star Bam Adebayo went up to contest Thunder guard Cason Wallace on a fast break layup and didn’t appear to touch him. The refs still called a foul on Adebayo after Wallace missed a dunk, and the foul call was upheld on replay review. Judge for yourself here:
Maybe Adebayo touched Wallace’s hair? A little bit of a shoulder rub, perhaps? This is a play where there’s likely no foul called if Wallace just flushes the dunk. When he missed, the refs thought there had to be contact. What ever happened to a good, ole fashioned contest?
Wallace ended up splitting the free throws. I think that still counts as a Ball Don’t Lie?
Meanwhile when the Thunder are on offense, Lu Dort is just shoving defenders out of the way with no call:
Again, the numbers don’t match the narrative that the Thunder get away with a lot of calls. OKC’s bigger crime against basketball is that they foul their opponents constantly so the refs can’t call all of them. We’ll see if that holds true again in the 2026 NBA Playoffs.
The Thunder beat the Heat, 124-112. OKC doesn’t look quite as unstoppable as it did earlier in the season. Getting calls like this the rest of the way sure would help.
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