The Power List: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

If standing atop the hockey world feels like a Canadian birthright, dominating men’s basketball is another story. Though a Canadian invented the game, Canada has struggled to be relevant within it: one of our only two NBA teams relocated to the U.S., we have yet to win an international basketball championship and we haven’t climbed an Olympic podium for the sport since 1936. We had a brief moment of glory in 2019, when Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors won the NBA title and sent the city into a frenzy even the Leafs would be jealous of. But five years later, we’re starving for the next big thing.

For that, there’s a new contender on the horizon. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a gangly 25-year-old guard from Hamilton, Ontario, who is currently leading the Oklahoma City Thunder through an auspicious 2024 campaign. The Great One moniker may already have been taken by a certain hockey star, so consider Gilgeous-Alexander Canada’s Next One—a talent of incredible on-court physicality and timing and lots of off-court swagger.

Gilgeous-Alexander was born in Toronto and moved to Hamilton at age 10. Athletics ran in the family: his mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, was a track athlete who competed for Antigua and Barbuda in the 1992 Olympics. His father, Vaughn Alexander, coached him as a kid. In Grade 11 he moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to seek a higher level of competition and, over the next three years, he transformed into a world-class prospect. He was selected 11th overall by the middling Charlotte Hornets in 2018, but was traded to the Los Angeles Clippers the same day. Things temporarily soured; he was traded again in his first year, to Oklahoma City, and spent the second half of 2021 on the sidelines nursing a torn plantar fascia. Ankle issues kept him off the court for much of 2022. 

But last year was his tour de force. He finished fourth in league scoring and was in the running to become the NBA’s most valuable player. This season has been more of the same. He earned his first start at an NBA All-Star Game and is in lockstep with Luka Dončić as the league’s top offensive star. LeBron James and Steph Curry agree: SGA is one of the few they trust to carry the torch once they retire.

Not that Gilgeous-Alexander plays like either of them. He doesn’t have LeBron’s physical dominance or Curry’s shooting magic. At face value, he is an enigma: he has led the NBA in drives per game in each of the past four seasons without being particularly big (six-foot-six, which in the NBA is unremarkable). From the stands, it’s hard to see what exactly he does to make world-class defenders trip over their own feet when trying to predict his next move. His secret sauce is twofold and subtle: he has a rare combination of superior ankle flexibility and braking ability, which allows him to stop and switch paths at a velocity that helps him to pop in and out of a full lunge as his opponent stands still. That combination is SGA’s X factor, analogous to Andre De Grasse’s abnormally fast turnover, Christine Sinclair’s clutch scoring ability and Wayne Gretzky’s nearly psychic field sense.

He’s just as charismatic off the court as he is on it. SGA waxes poetic on his Instagram profile, writing angsty bars and coupling them with photos of himself wearing flashy outfits: pink leather shirts, oversized blue jeans, cartoony MSCHF boots. He dropped jaws at last year’s Met Gala by wearing an intricately textured black-and-white coat in honour of the late designer Karl Lagerfeld. He was named GQ’s most stylish man of the year in 2022. His fashion sense has landed him a shoe deal with Converse, the role of global ambassador for Canada Goose and an influencing gig for Kim Kardashian’s Skims brand. He represents a new kind of Canadian star: a player-brand whose appeal transcends the court.

In 2023, Gilgeous-Alexander led his country at the FIBA World Cup—and the team’s success there qualified Canada for the Olympics for the first time in 10 years. At the tournament, he was named a First Team All-Star, leading a roster full of young talent to a third-place finish. “Representing my Canadian roots will always be such an important part of my career,” he said. 

SGA is hardly alone in ushering the spirit of basketball forward in this country. A slew of his Canadian NBA compatriots, including Jamal Murray, Andrew Wiggins and R.J. Barrett, to name a few, also bring fans to their feet several nights per week. But Gilgeous-Alexander is the de facto leader of a troupe of hungry Canadians poised to achieve the nation’s best Olympic showing in generations. Take it from legendary Canadian basketball coach Steve Nash, who this year told a reporter, “If he’s not already, he’ll be the best Canadian to ever play the game—and in short order.”

This story appears in the May issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to the magazine here.