Canada’s greatest basketball moment to date helped set its next great accomplishment in motion.
While the country basked in the Toronto Raptors’ 2019 NBA championship, the team’s star, Kawhi Leonard, plotted an intricate next move. News that he’d sign with the L.A. Clippers broke barely three weeks after the Raptors raised the Larry O’Brien trophy for the first time in franchise history.
With Leonard wanting a superstar to play alongside, the Clippers and the Oklahoma City Thunder worked out a trade. Paul George went to the Clippers, while a then 21-year-old Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (along with sharpshooter Danilo Gallinari and four unprotected first-round picks) went to the Thunder.
On Wednesday night, Gilgeous-Alexander was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, making the guard the second-ever Canadian player to win the award, after Steve Nash won back-to-back MVPs with the Phoenix Suns in 2005 and 2006.
The Oklahoma City Thunder star was moved to tears during his MVP award speech when he acknowledged his wife, Hailey Summers.
After he thanked his teammates, support staff, management, family and friends, he focused on the woman he married in February 2024.
“Thank you so much,” he said as he looked at her from a podium. “Thank you for everything you are — for me, for our son, Ares. You were the first person to show me what love really meant ... what sacrifice really meant. And I can’t wait to spend the rest of this journey called life with you. Thank you very much. I wouldn’t be the man I am, I wouldn’t be the player I am, I wouldn’t be the father I am, without you. Thank you.”
Gilgeous-Alexander spoke without notes and held it together when he thanked his teammates.
“I can’t say enough how much you guys mean to me, and not only as a basketball player, but as family,” he said. “I know you guys know that we do everything together, on and off the court, we do shopping, we eat. You guys are really like my brothers ... Without you guys, none of this would be possible. I want you guys to know that this award is your award, too.”
The whole team was on the stage with him sporting the Rolex watches he bought them and wearing black shirts with his image and MVP in red letters on the front.
A Canadian success story
Gilgeous-Alexander is the stoic, highly productive, undisputed leader of a 68-win Thunder team – the league’s fourth-best-ever regular season record – which is playing in the second round of the playoffs for the second consecutive year. At just 26, he’s somehow a veteran on a roster that is the youngest team in the league, with an average player age of 24.15 years old. It feels like the Hamilton product has the basketball world at his fingertips.
Twenty years ago, it was Nash lifting that trophy, trying to carry his team and the hopes of a rabid, championship-starved fan base from the spring into the summer. The world outside these arenas has changed drastically in that time, but inside, the vibe remains the same. And as they did for Nash, the country watches Gilgeous-Alexander, lapping up inspiration while a new generation of players sets their eyes on following his lead.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s path to the top of the NBA is a Canadian success story that has new chapters added to it every summer. Despite his nine-figure contract and the wealth of amenities at the disposal of a franchise player, the NBA’s MVP has fine-tuned his game year after year in a Hamilton gym. He works out with Nate Mitchell, an assistant coach from the Canadian men’s national team program, and a group of friends from Gilgeous-Alexander’s high school days. As reported in The Athletic, that group gained a former Div 1 power forward who happened to be in the gym for an early morning shootaround; he helps Gilgeous-Alexander navigate plays under the basket.
Gilgeous-Alexander shoots the ball over Pascal Siakam of the Indiana Pacers.William Purnell/Getty Images
The throne that Gilgeous-Alexander sits on is built on those early morning and afternoon shootarounds, which sandwich weight sessions and training. It‘s built on working with Mitchell and that group of friends on duplicating live, working defences that have increasingly been built to stop him, yet seem to fail a little more every year.
The only thing that has broken up that offseason rhythm over the years is his commitment to Canada‘s basketball program. Last year he led Canada‘s men’s team to its first Olympic appearance in 24 years. The year before that he starred on the team that won bronze over the U.S. in the FIBA men’s World Cup, becoming the first Canadian man named to the FIBA World Cup All-Star Five.
On the international stage, he follows in his mother Charmaine Gilgeous’s speedy footsteps. She’s a former track athlete who competed for Antigua and Barbuda in the women’s 400 metres in the 1992 Olympics. His father, Vaughn Alexander, was a high-school basketball player in Toronto. With the Thunder battling the Minnesota Timberwolves in the third round of the playoffs, Gilgeous-Alexander is up against family on the court. His cousin Nickeil Alexander-Walker is a shooting guard for the Timberwolves.
Gilgeous-Alexander wears a pair of Converse SHAI 001 shoes.Luke Hales/Getty Images
A new face of the NBA
A runner-up for the MVP award a year ago, losing to the Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, Gilgeous-Alexander’s dominance has long been established. His MVP win, however, cements him as one of the faces of the league.
He has endorsements with Skims and Canada Goose and has been a regular in AT&T ads for the past two years. In 2024 he signed a contract extension with Converse, whom he first signed with in 2020, taking on the title of creative director of basketball. He debuted his SHAI 001 sneaker during NBA All-Star weekend this year.
His on-court skills are one thing, but his sense of style is the driving force behind brands wanting to partner with him. Much like Russell Westbrook in his Oklahoma City days, Gilgeous-Alexander has turned the tunnel walk at the Thunder’s Paycom Center into a runway where he shows off his varied and expensive closet, which spills out with high-end designers. GQ named him its most stylish man of the year in 2022 and when SLAM Magazine shifted its popular LeagueFits fashion-first Instagram account to a single-edition print issue this year, Gilgeous-Alexander was the obvious cover choice.
His Instagram account blends the elements of his life together for his 4.1 million followers, showing selected highlights from previous games, more of his fashion choices and his home life with his wife, Hailey Summers, and their one-year-old son, Ares. All of that is presented with the hint of a soul of a poet, with photo captions often written as hip-hop verses.
A three-time All-Star who stands to be named to the All-NBA first-team for the third time in his career this year, Gilgeous-Alexander led the league in scoring this season for the first time, with 32.7 points per game. He tied for fourth in steals, at 1.7 per game and added five rebounds per game and a career-best 6.4 assists per game.
But in an age where everything is debatable, his MVP win will have some detractors.
A fan holds up signs making reference to Gilgeous-Alexander before Game 1 of the second-round playoff series against the Denver Nuggets.Nate Billings/The Associated Press
A contentious MVP race
The final vote count may not reflect it, but this MVP race has been hotly contested throughout the season, once Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokic emerged as the top two candidates.
In Oklahoma City, the Thunder made a habit of setting lengthy winning streaks. They started 7-0, marking their first of three seven-game winning streaks. They ran off 10 wins between Dec. 19 and Jan. 5 and had an 11-game stretch between March 12 and April 2. The Thunder’s 68-14 record was a franchise-best (going back to the team’s days in Seattle) and their 12.9 point-per-game margin of victory also set an NBA record.
Gilgeous-Alexander was of course the motor behind the franchise’s benchmark season. He plays wise beyond his 26 years, with a duck-like calmness above the water, powered by a furious output underneath. While putting up career-best numbers, he has reached new heights offensively, breaking the 50-point mark four times in the 2025 portion of the season, adding to his reputation for consistency (he led the league with 49, 30-plus-point games this year). On the defensive side of the ball he has developed into a tough perimeter defender, helping the Thunder to a league-best 106.6 defensive rating, which measures the points a team or player allows per 100 possessions.
In Denver, Jokic put together arguably the best season of his surefire hall-of-fame career, evoking the names of legends along the way. His 29.6 points per game are a career high and the 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists he averaged made him just the third player in NBA history to average a triple-double (Oscar Robertson did it first in 1961-62; Westbrook did it four times in his career over a five-year span).
Jokic is the first centre to average a triple-double and had a Wilt Chamberlain-like season, placing second in the league in scoring and assists, while finishing third in rebounds. Oddly the 6-foot-6 Gilgeous-Alexander’s one block per game was slightly more than the 6-foot11 Jokic’s 0.7.
Those lobbying for the Serbian centre to win the award will point out that the Nuggets didn’t surround Jokic with a cast of stars (or at least young, bouncy legs that can help a team through a season) that the Thunder have given Gilgeous-Alexander.
The Nuggets fought through their season to a 50-32 finish, with Jokic’s brilliance coming at the cost of him logging a career-high 36.7 minutes played per game. In the final week of their regular season, the team said it would not renew general manager Calvin Booth‘s contract and that it had fired head coach Michael Malone, who were with the team when it won its first NBA title in 2023. Fans have had fun online in the wake of the departures, pointing out how active Jokic has been on the Denver sideline in timeouts. It‘s a stark contrast from the smooth ride the Thunder have enjoyed this year.
The MVP award is voted on annually but the subsequent debates on the winners can live forever. In hindsight, Kobe Bryant‘s singular MVP nod feels inadequate for the enormity of his career. It could be argued that LeBron James, a four-time winner of the award, or even Michael Jordan, a five-time winner, deserved more. Jokic handily defeated Gilgeous-Alexander in last year’s MVP vote but lost out on the award in 2023 to Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid. Debates around who wins the award seem to intensify the greater a candidate’s career becomes. These two almost year-long front-runners could continue to battle each other next year, as well.
However fans might argue the award, voters decided that the 2024-25 season belonged to the low-key, hard-working Hamiltonian who led the Thunder to new heights.
With a report from The Associated Press
Kyle Phillips/The Associated Press
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