Last June, with the confetti still being swept off the Paycom Center floor, a blue-clad crowd gathered inside the Broadway 10 Bar & Chophouse to celebrate Oklahoma City’s NBA championship. Surrounded by friends and family (and a healthy number of their friends and their families), Thunder players, coaches and staffers partied deep into the night. Guests picked at buffet tables lined with steak medallions and crab cakes. Against a wall, the Larry O’Brien trophy rested as a prop for pictures. Champagne that went largely untouched in Oklahoma City’s locker room—what do you expect from a title winner led by a bunch of early-20-somethings who needed help figuring out how to pop the cork?—flowed liberally into glass flutes. A few freshly shotgunned beer cans littered the floor. In the middle of it all was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s MVP, scoring champion and Finals MVP, the fourth player ever to complete that trifecta in one season. In between hugs and high fives, Gilgeous-Alexander was overheard offering a promise: I can be so much better.
“Well,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, “I can be.” It’s mid-November and he is in the backseat of a black SUV speeding down an empty Oklahoma City highway. The suggestion that it seemed strange to be thinking about improving after one of the greatest single seasons in sports history draws a shrug. “I think more than anything I was excited by the fact that I had achieved those things and still had so much room to grow,” he says. As a teenager, Gilgeous-Alexander jotted down goals in a notebook. Division I scholarship. NBA player. Lottery pick. Over time the goals got more ambitious. All-Star. MVP. NBA champion. “There’s an obsessiveness to him,” says Nate Mitchell, who has been training Gilgeous-Alexander since he was 16.
There’s also a palpable self-assuredness to Gilgeous-Alexander. He doesn’t see anything about his success as all that complicated. (“Nothing about him boils down to like an epiphany or an anecdote,” says Thunder coach Mark Daigneault.) He ties his rise to NBA superstardom to what earned him a scholarship to Kentucky or turned him into a lottery pick. “The way I saw it was when I was in ninth grade, nobody saw me and was like, ‘He’s going to be the 11th pick in the NBA draft,’ ” says Gilgeous-Alexander. “And I did it, so why can’t I just implement the same thing on a different scale, on a different level using the same process?”
That work bred confidence. Last May, Oklahoma City lost Game 3 of the conference semifinals in overtime, giving Denver a 2–1 series lead. As the Nuggets celebrated, cameras caught Gilgeous-Alexander grinning while a fan heckled him as he walked off the floor. “In my mind I was like, When we win, you’re going to feel like absolute dogs—, ” he says. “That’s why I started laughing. He’s acting like they won Game 7. I was like, I’m going to remember that face. He’ll feel it when we win.”
“Ruthlessly consistent” is how Daigneault describes Gilgeous-Alexander. Daigneault first met him in 2019, when Shai was acquired from the Clippers as the centerpiece of a deal with the Clippers for Paul George. Well, sort of. The real prize at the time was the cache of draft picks, five first-rounders and two swaps. Gilgeous-Alexander was a skinny combo guard coming off a decent rookie year.
Daigneault, then an assistant, liked what he saw early. When COVID-19 shut the season down in 2020, the team scattered. Months later, when the NBA returned, Daigneault was struck by the changes to Gilgeous-Alexander’s physique and his game, calling an early scrimmage a “whoa moment.” Asked about Gilgeous-Alexander’s pandemic improvements, Mitchell launches into a description of hourslong workouts at an empty gym before pausing. “Wait,” he says, “can we still get in trouble for that?”
Oklahoma City’s rise to NBA champion has been methodical. The Thunder won 22 games in 2020–21, a season after having stripped away the last remnants of their first would-be dynasty. They won a whopping 24 the next season and didn’t crack .500 until ’23–24. There were double-digit losing streaks, pick-centric deals and (justifiable) grumblings of tanking from league officials. But the Thunder never deviated. They believed in the plan, and it paid off.
Gilgeous-Alexander is wired similarly. He was cut from his high school’s version of a junior varsity team. It took him 15 games to permanently crack the starting lineup at Kentucky. Three guards were taken before him in the 2018 draft. In his first season with the Thunder, he was an off-the-ball complement to Chris Paul. Skepticism didn’t dissuade him. It motivated him. “He had a vision for himself,” says Daigneault. “He saw this earlier and clearer than anyone.”
Did he see this, being named Sports Illustrated’s 2025 Sportsperson of the Year? Probably not, though his mother, Charmaine, insists her two boys, 27-year-old Shai and his younger brother, Thomasi, were avid readers of SI Kids. Still, Gilgeous-Alexander is the 72nd recipient of SI’s top honor and the first Canadian to win the award outright since Wayne Gretzky in 1982. He earned it for leading the Thunder to a franchise record 68-win season. For steering the team to two Game 7 closeouts in the playoffs. For etching the name of a small market oil town in the heart of college football country onto basketball’s most coveted trophy. For his charitable works, both in OKC and in Canada.
And for not taking his foot off the gas. Through December, Oklahoma City was 29–5, miles ahead of its closest competitor in the Western Conference. The Thunder went 18–1 before Jalen Williams, an All-NBA guard, had played a minute. Shai has been the driving force, with numbers across the board equal to or better than last season. Not since 2018 has the NBA had a back-to-back champion, but with Gilgeous-Alexander the Thunder are the favorites to do it. And if you believe him, he’s just getting started.
In November, after Gilgeous-Alexander cooked his team for 30-plus points, a rival assistant coach bemoaned the lack of ways to stop him. It isn’t just that SGA is efficient in the paint (51.9%), from midrange (50%) and beyond the arc (37.5%). “He’s a 6′ 6
Alexander Is Sports Illustrated’s 2025 Sportsperson of the Year
