Gilgeous-Alexander, or SGA, is known for many things—winning NBA MVP two years in a row; becoming one of the only players in league history to sweep the regular-season MVP, scoring title, and Finals MVP in the same year (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, and Shaquille O’Neal are the others); being selected four times for both the All-Star team and the All-NBA First Team; and being named the 2026 Clutch Player of the Year. But the Oklahoma City Thunder superstar who has achieved initial status—think MJ, Dr. J, or KD—has also faced backlash. Fellow players, pundits, and the NBA’s chaotic online tinderbox have accused him of “flopping”—or acting as if he were hit much harder than he really was, often falling down in the process, to goad the ref into calling a foul. The goal: get to the free-throw line for two easy points.
San Antonio’s 7-ft. 4-in. alien talent Victor Wembanyama helped unleash this anger in December when he said, after a Spurs win over the Thunder, that he was glad to suit up for a team that practiced “pure and ethical basketball.” The implication was clear: OKC is a bunch of foul merchants, with Gilgeous-Alexander, who led the NBA in free-throws-made per game for a third straight season, the top salesman. The criticism only escalated when the Thunder faced the Spurs for a spot in the Finals.
I want to gauge SGA’s feelings about all the noise. Up to this point, he has seemed almost universally admired, if not beloved—perhaps by dint of his businesslike demeanor, low-wattage Canadian upbringing, and small-market employer. Understandably, given his 30-plus-points-per-game average, 88% efficiency from the line over the past three regular seasons and playoffs combined, plethora of honors, and the $285 million contract extension he signed in July 2025, SGA is unapologetic about his approach to scoring. “Playing this game has done amazing things for my and my family’s life,” he says. “And if a narrative on social media is the worst that comes from this game for me, well, I’d take that a million times out of a million times.”
Besides, he has other priorities at the moment. Last season, Oklahoma City was on the brink of establishing a dynasty. They were the reigning NBA champions, having won a title in 2025, and had again finished with the league’s best record. Then the Spurs sent them home in that contentious seven-game series. “Awful feeling, sick to your stomach,” SGA recalls. “I tried to let it go for a little bit. Don’t obsess over it. Not yet.”
The Thunder are now the co-favorites with the Spurs—against whom they face off in the season opener on Oct. 20—to win the 2027 title, but other teams are hogging the spotlight. The New York Knicks are enjoying much of the shine after bringing the championship trophy home after a 53-year drought, and could become the first franchise in nearly a decade to repeat. Meanwhile the Philadelphia 76ers, on paper, have assembled a superteam, as LeBron James and Jaylen Brown join forces with 2023 league MVP Joel Embiid, two-time All-Star Tyrese Maxey, and VJ Edgecombe, who finished third in 2026 Rookie of the Year voting.
Gilgeous-Alexander, 28, is used to being overlooked: he’s morphed from an underhyped draft pick, and the consolation prize in a blockbuster trade, to arguably the best basketball player on earth. Through spectacularly consistent work, he has mastered basketball physics, starting and stopping and slithering his way into the lane enough to, in March, break Wilt Chamberlain’s record for most consecutive games scoring at least 20 points (126). “One person saw this happening,” says Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, who was an assistant coach when SGA joined the team in 2019. “And it was him. That’s it. If anybody else says, ‘This is what I saw,’ then it’s revisionist history.”
SGA wants to strike that dutiful descriptor—arguably—from the record. “I think I’m the best player in the NBA,” he says. “I think the production that I have night in and night out is best-player-in-the-NBA production. I think the efficiency that I do it at is best-player-in-the-NBA efficiency. I think everybody picks up a basketball or a soccer ball or a football or a tennis ball to win the game, the match, whatever it is. And I’ve done my fair share of winning in these past couple years.”
SGA credits his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario—“an underdog city”—for his work ethic, which is helpful considering the two-time NBA MVP didn’t make the JV team in ninth grade. Born to Vaughn Alexander, who won a high school city championship in Toronto, and Charmaine Gilgeous, who represented Antigua and Barbuda in the 400 m at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he and his younger brother Thomasi sampled all kinds of sports, including the national pastime of hockey—though never on ice. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t afford it,” he says. But by high school, SGA was all in on basketball.
So it was a “wake-up call” when he was cut from the squad. “I thought I was this player,” he says. “I learned quickly that I wasn’t.” (In an oft-told tale, Michael Jordan’s high school coach cut him from the varsity team as a sophomore, fueling his ferocious competitiveness: the man was booed when introduced at a Jordan salute in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and Jordan referenced the slight in his Hall of Fame speech. “You made a mistake, dude,” Jordan said. SGA, on the other hand, doesn’t even recall this coach’s name. “I’ll let him off the hook,” he says.)
He sprouted from 5 ft. 7 in., with big clown feet, in ninth grade to 6 ft. 2 in. at the end of 10th. But, he says, “I was wonky. I was growing with knee pains, moving slow, hard to control my body.” So SGA and his club-basketball coach Dwayne Washington, a high school math and science teacher, spent hours in the gym developing tricks to compensate for his lack of coordination: superior ballhandling, changing speeds to deceive defenders, perfecting the art of deceleration—stopping fast on a dribble, so a defender’s momentum carries him past you. He wrote down practice instructions in a marble notebook. “He is able to sustain concentration for longer periods of time than anybody I’ve seen,” says Washington. “Everything is predicated on his inner clock to slow down, focus on tasks, and problem solve.”
By the time SGA matured into his 6-ft. 6-in. frame, and became more athletic and efficient in his movements, those tricks had evolved into lethal weapons. In order to face better competition, he and his first cousin, Atlanta Hawks guard Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who grew up in Toronto, played their last two years of high school basketball together in the U.S. They led Hamilton Heights Christian Academy, in Chattanooga, Tenn., to a Christian schools national championship. “Being able to hold your own in America is the first step to like, ‘OK, I’m on the right track,’” says SGA.
The next stop was the University of Kentucky, where he planned to do one year before entering the NBA Draft. He feels fortunate that NIL—the legal right of college athletes to cash in on their name, image, and likeness—wasn’t on the books then. Having so many options and so much money in college can sap a player’s urgency to collect a pro payday. “For me, it was so simple,” he says. “Now it’s tricky. You’re right out of high school. You don’t know anything. It’s hard to make smart business decisions. Kids have handlers, but you see it all the time: guys go down the wrong path because they’re advised by the wrong people. There’s room for error.”
In the 2018 draft, the Charlotte Hornets selected SGA with the 11th overall pick, then traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers minutes later. He had a promising rookie season, scoring 10.8 points per game, and finished sixth in Rookie of the Year voting. But Gilgeous-Alexander, along with the Clippers’ third leading scorer, Danilo Gallinari, and a boatload of future first-round draft choices, was shipped to the Thunder for Paul George, who had finished third in the MVP voting that season. “You’re never as good as you think you are, or as safe or as comfortable as you think you are,” he says. “I just use it as a chip on my shoulder.”
Playing with Hall of Famer Chris Paul in his first OKC season further enhanced his development. “I used to eat terrible,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, who strongly believes that Canadian McDonald’s is better than American McDonald’s, thank you very much. “The seriousness that he approached the things outside of the game, his diet, the weight room, recovery, everything that he did ticked towards his performance. That was pretty eye-opening to me.”
In March 2020, the pandemic shut down sports and SGA returned to Ontario. When he came back to OKC for pre-bubble workouts in June, he was visibly stronger. “It was COVID, everybody’s on Zoom calls, staying in their pajamas all day,” says Daigneault. “You’re like, ‘OK, maybe he’s in his pajamas, but if he’s in his pajamas, he’s lifting.’ He was not resting.” On a vet-laden playoff team that earned a five seed in the loaded Western Conference, it was SGA, the sophomore, who topped the Thunder in scoring.
In Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder had a foundational piece. But the team would take its lumps. “We had to take a longer view to get to a more sustainable level of winning,” says OKC general manager Sam Presti. The franchise lost 50 games in 2020–21 and 58 in 2021–22, before creeping back near .500, 40-42, in 2022–23. But for Presti, those years were productive: He cleared salary-cap space and used the first-round picks from the Clippers deal—plus the Thunder’s own selections—to stockpile young standouts like Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, both drafted in 2022, and use others as trade assets. This fallow period also put the Thunder in position to better compensate their emerging stars and to add veteran role players like Isaiah Hartenstein, who joined the team in 2024.
The losing seasons never got SGA down. “I get to go out there and essentially shoot any ball that I want,” he says. “So many players don’t get this opportunity. I was so wrapped up in just playing the game that I love with that amount of responsibility that it was honestly just so fun for me that I didn’t even care.”
He was also enjoying himself off the court, establishing a reputation as one of the world’s best-dressed athletes. He showcased his fashion sense before and after Thunder games, at the Met Gala, and even on a Paris Fashion Week runway. “It’s fun to be able to play with color palettes,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, who has arrived at arenas in all-leather outfits, oversize fur coats, and various presentations of camo. “I’ve always been into arts and crafts, and it’s a way to do it through clothes.” He beat out Timothée Chalamet and A$AP Rocky for GQ’s Most Stylish Man of 2022, well before the Thunder became a national TV staple. “My parents always made sure that we looked presentable,” he says. “That was a nonnegotiable. Little things, whether it’s making sure your pants are seamed the right way, or the collar was flapped the right way.”
SGA has inspired his teammates to look good too. “He’s made me spend more money, for sure,” quips Williams. The young, chic Thunder developed a unique chemistry. Gilgeous-Alexander and Holmgren sang an off-key parody of Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” in an AT&T commercial that ran ad nauseam during March Madness and the NBA playoffs in 2024; the next year Williams joined them in a new spot, the joke being they all wore the same outfit to an event. Players also developed a tradition of crashing postgame TV interviews with Thunder sideline reporter Nick Gallo, covering him in towels and executing other hijinks as he talks to the star of the game.
SGA sets the tone. “I was shocked at how normal he is,” says Williams. “It makes it really easy for people on the team to feel like they can be themselves.” As the accolades have piled up, he’s remained committed to meshing. “If you’re a superstar in the NBA, there’s a natural gravity that pulls you outside the team,” says Daigneault. “He wants to be one of the guys as badly as he wants to be an all-time player. He’s constantly plugging himself back into the team despite the gravity that’s pulling him out.”
After each of his MVP announcements, SGA bought gifts for his teammates: Rolexes in 2025; Audemars Piguet watches, Burberry trench coats, and golf clubs in May. “These guys don’t get to have as much fun,” he says. “I don’t ever have to think about my minutes. I don’t have to think about where my shots are coming from. Essentially, we go out there, we play my game. These guys rebound, dive on loose balls, do all the dirty work. They essentially play off of me. I just think that they deserve a little bit of credit for their sacrifice.”
After the Thunder won 68 regular-season games in 2024–25 and beat their opponents by an average of 12.9 points per game, a new NBA record, they began this past season 24-1, tying the 2015–16 Golden State Warriors for the hottest start ever. But injuries plagued them in the Western Conference Finals, as Williams and Ajay Mitchell, a second-year player who provided punch off the bench, missed key games. The 7-ft. 1-in. Holmgren had a particularly rough series: Wembanyama’s production (27.3 points per game) trumped Holmgren’s (10.7 points), and the Frenchman dunked on Holmgren minutes into Game 7. Holmgren finished that final game with 4 points, 4 rebounds, and no assists. Among fans and pundits, he took a beating.
But on the September day we spend together in Ontario, Gilgeous-Alexander says he was the one at fault. “The MVP of the league waited until Game 7 to have a good game,” he says. (While SGA’s output and efficiency did not meet his usual standard, he did shoot 50% from the field and score 30 points in OKC’s Game 2 victory over San Antonio.) “I don’t think it’s on Chet,” he says. “I carry a lot of the weight. The only way you can truly fail is if you don’t learn from the moment. I know the type of guy he is. And I know what type of worker he is. He’ll definitely do it.”
About two weeks later, I tell Holmgren that SGA blamed himself for the defeat. “I might disagree with him,” he replies. “Losing in a sh-tty fashion on the last game of the season, and f-ck-ing having that be your last game for the next three months or whatever, sucks. But he definitely checked on me. We chopped it up, trying to talk some hoops, figuring out how to use this time of the summer productively. I don’t think I’m somebody who necessarily needs to be checked in on. But it speaks to his character and his willingness and awareness to do that.”
Off Queen Elizabeth Way, not far from a Ford assembly plant that drives what’s left of Ontario’s manufacturing economy, sits the gym where Gilgeous-Alexander holes up all summer. It’s an unremarkable space—from time to time, SGA says, a shot bounces off the facility’s low ceiling. A half-dozen young men join him, a mix of former college players who offer some defensive
