We discuss the status of the strong coupling with special attention to using event shape observables based on data collected at the Large Electron Positron collider and theoretical predictions at highest accuracy available at present. We argue that such extractions can be competitive with lattice results if we select the event shapes sufficiently carefully such that both non-perturbative and higher order perturbative contributions are as small as possible. We give a list of such observables and study one particular class in detail. We present predictions for the soft drop thrust at the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy in QCD perturbation theory and study the scale dependence as a function of the grooming parameters.