Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the 2025-26 NBA Most Valuable Player and the best scorer in professional basketball. He averaged 32.0 points, 6.4 assists, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.7 steals per game in the 2025-26 regular season on 53.5/39.4/91.0 shooting splits. He is the third Canadian player to win the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award, after Steve Nash won it in 2005 and 2006. He led the Oklahoma City Thunder to a 67-15 regular-season record, the third-best single-season record in post-merger NBA history behind the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls (72-10) and the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors (73-9). His on-off net rating split in 2025-26 (Thunder were +12.8 per 100 possessions with him on the floor, +0.4 with him off) is the largest individual impact split in the league by a wide margin. He is 25 years old.
Hamilton, Ontario and the Canadian pipeline
He was born July 12, 2000 in Hamilton, Ontario, the second-largest city in Ontario after Toronto. Hamilton is not a traditional basketball city. It is known primarily as a steel-manufacturing hub and as the home of the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats. His father, Vaughn Gilgeous-Alexander, played professional basketball in North America at the minor-league level. His mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, raised him in Hamilton while his father’s career took him elsewhere.
He played his high-school basketball at Hamilton’s Cathedral High School. The Canadian basketball pipeline has improved substantially since the Nash era: the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association, which Cathedral competes in, developed alongside programs like Athlete Institute and CBC (Canadian Basketball Circuit) to route Ontario players toward U.S. college programs. SGA’s recruitment started late by American standards. He was not a nationally ranked recruit in the U.S. by any service, but his profile built quickly in his junior year and Kentucky’s John Calipari offered him a scholarship.
Kentucky (2017-18)
He played one season at Kentucky under Calipari. He averaged 14.4 points, 5.1 rebounds, 3.3 assists, and 1.6 steals per game for a Wildcats team that went 26-11 and lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The Kentucky single season produced one notable analytical signal that every subsequent SGA projection relied on: his steal rate (3.0 percent) and his free-throw rate (FTr of 0.45: he got to the line almost once for every two field-goal attempts) were both historically high for a freshman guard, which pointed to the kind of body-control-and-pressure offense he would develop over the next eight years.
He declared for the 2018 NBA Draft after his freshman year.
The 2018 draft and the Charlotte-to-OKC trade
The 2018 NBA Draft is now most discussed as the draft in which Luka Dončić went third and Trae Young went fifth. SGA went eleventh, to the Charlotte Hornets. On draft night, July 26, 2018, Charlotte traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers along with Miles Bridges and Malik Monk, in exchange for Kemba Walker (in the framework of a sign-and-trade). That same night, within hours, the Clippers traded SGA, Danilo Gallinari, and multiple draft picks to Oklahoma City for Paul George. Three teams, one night, and SGA had been moved twice before playing a professional game.
The Paul George trade is the organizational hinge of the Thunder’s current dynasty. Oklahoma City sent Paul George to Los Angeles, received SGA and a payload of draft picks that became, in subsequent years, the draft capital used to build the roster around him. SGA was the focal piece of the return, not the draft picks.
The Thunder development years (2018-2022)
His first three seasons in Oklahoma City were rebuilding years. The Thunder were cycling Paul George, then Russell Westbrook, then Chris Paul through the organization while SGA developed as the franchise’s foundational piece under head coach Billy Donovan. His scoring averages from 2018-22: 10.8, 19.0, 23.7, 24.7 points per game. The jump from his rookie year to his second year (8.2 points added per game) was one of the largest single-season improvements by any point guard since Dwyane Wade between his first and second seasons.
Chris Paul joined the Thunder for the 2019-20 season in a separate trade. The Paul-SGA pairing that season (Paul teaching SGA how to use the mid-range pull-up as a bail-out shot and how to manipulate pick-and-roll coverages) is regularly cited by Thunder coaches as the year SGA became a franchise player rather than a project. Paul left for Phoenix after one season. SGA stayed.
Mark Daigneault and the championship core (2022-2025)
In 2022, the Thunder hired Mark Daigneault as head coach. Daigneault had spent seven years as the OKC G League coach and three years as an assistant. He is, at 38, the youngest head coach of a defending NBA champion.
The 2022 NBA Draft gave OKC the second pick, Chet Holmgren, a 7’1” center from Gonzaga with a three-point shooting range and a defensive footprint that matched almost exactly what SGA’s offensive system needed. Holmgren missed his entire rookie year with a foot injury. He returned for 2023-24 and the Thunder went 57-25.
In the 2025 playoffs, Oklahoma City beat New Orleans, Denver, and Minnesota in the West, then beat Boston in five games in the NBA Finals. SGA averaged 29.4 points, 7.1 assists, and 1.9 steals in the playoffs. In Game 4 of the Finals, Jayson Tatum tore his right Achilles, which altered the series’ competitive shape; the Thunder won Game 5 in Boston 112-107 with SGA scoring 34 on 14-of-23 shooting.
He was not the Finals MVP. Chet Holmgren won the award on a 20.4-point, 8.6-rebound, 2.8-block average that made the defensive case the media had been building for two years. SGA finished second in Finals MVP voting.
The 2025-26 season and the MVP
The Thunder entered 2025-26 as the consensus title favorite. SGA averaged 32.0 points per game (the fifth-highest single-season average in NBA history for a player on a 60-win team) on the most efficient shooting package of his career. His 53.5 percent from the field on a volume of approximately 19 attempts per game is comparable to Stephen Curry’s 2015-16 season in terms of combining efficiency with volume.
The April 17, 2026 finalists announcement listed SGA alongside Victor Wembanyama, Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, and Jaylen Brown. The Athletic’s awards-ladder poll had SGA at 96 of 100 first-place votes before the announcement. The official vote was announced May 27, 2026, at the NBA Awards Show in New York. He won with 94 of 100 first-place votes. Jokić was second.
The Canadian MVP angle is real and is not nothing. Nash won consecutive MVPs in 2005 and 2006 out of Phoenix. Between Nash and SGA, no Canadian had finished in the top three. Canada’s basketball pipeline, which has now produced Steve Nash, Andrew Wiggins (2022 champion), Tristan Thompson (2016 champion), and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2025 champion and 2026 MVP), is the most quietly productive national pipeline in NBA history outside the United States.
Style of play
SGA’s offense is built on body-control layups and free throws, not athleticism in the conventional sense. He is long (6’6” wingspan on a 6’6” frame), left-hand dominant, and converts at a career clip above 75 percent from the charity stripe. His shot profile skews heavily toward at-rim and mid-range pull-ups. He resists the three-point-heavy diet most point guards have adopted in the analytics era, which makes his efficiency case more interesting, not less.
The steal rate that scouts noticed at Kentucky (1.6 steals per game as a freshman in 2017-18) has scaled to the NBA. He averaged 1.7 steals per game in 2025-26, the second-highest rate in the league. He has led the NBA in steals per game twice in his career, an unusual combination for a player who is the primary offensive option on his team.
The comparison the broadcast analysts reach for most often is Dwyane Wade: same left-hand preference, same body-control-and-contact offensive style, same steal rate. Add Nash’s playmaking IQ and Kawhi Leonard’s defensive intensity and you have something that didn’t exist before him. It is not a combination that existed before him.
Gear
Shop official SGA and Oklahoma City Thunder gear on Fanatics, and grab a card blaster while his peak-value rookie cards are still accessible.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander career statistics.
- NBA.com, 2025-26 Most Valuable Player announcement (May 27, 2026).
- The Athletic, awards-ladder coverage and OKC championship reporting (2025-26 season).
- ESPN, SGA career profile and draft coverage.
- Kentucky Athletics, 2017-18 season statistics.
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