Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Is Speeding Up OKC’s Rebuild

Think the Thunder should be tanking? Thanks to the team’s breakout star, Oklahoma City is surprisingly exciting—and on the verge of a playoff spot.

Whenever the Thunder are home with two days off between games, the Quail Creek Golf & Country Club has a trespasser. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has access to all the amenities at Oklahoma City’s 55,000-square-foot practice facility, from a smoothie bar to a 27-seat film room. It’s what he can’t get there that takes him to the outskirts of the city: a tennis court. A Thunder staffer—a club member—slips Gilgeous-Alexander in, usually a few minutes before close, ushering the 6'6" point guard down a short hallway and through a gift shop that opens into a room with three royal-blue hardcourt surfaces. Inside, Gilgeous-Alexander grabs a racket and starts striking. He rips forehands. He lunges for backhands. The games are intense. “Fiery,” says Mark Castillanes, a longtime friend and frequent tennis foe.

Physically, there is little that seems to connect the movements of tennis and basketball.

Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

“Sometimes I feel super uncoordinated,” says Gilgeous-Alexander. Mentally, the feeling is familiar. “Everything is in your hands in tennis. You can’t blame nobody else. It’s how good you’re going to be versus X opponent, and you have got to figure it out.”

Gilgeous-Alexander took up the game last summer and has quickly improved, eagerly absorbing advice from club pros. “He loves a challenge,” says Timberwolves guard Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Shai’s cousin. “Not to prove anything to anyone. Just himself.”

Patience is an obvious asset with any new venture, and Gilgeous-Alexander (SGA for Twitter users on a character count or print journalists eager to abbreviate the longest last name in NBA history) is steeped in it. He entered high school with the physique of a jockey—5'7", 110 pounds with spidery arms and Hobbit-sized feet. “No physical tools,” says Dwayne Washington, who coached SGA at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School in Hamilton, Ont., for two seasons. In SGA’s lone year at Kentucky, he didn’t crack the starting lineup until midseason.

With Oklahoma City—he was traded with a bevy of draft picks from the Clippers to the Thunder after his rookie season in the deal that sent Paul George to L.A.—he found himself on the ground floor of an ambitious rebuild. “Every person has trials and tribulations and adversity in their life at some point,” Gilgeous-Alexander says. “But what makes you who you are is how you learn from them and how you get better from them and how you are after them. I try to remember [that] when I’m going through those situations.”

As he speaks, Gilgeous-Alexander reclines on a leather bench inside the Thunder facility. Across the floor, a rehabbing Chet Holmgren launches jump shots. Luguentz Dort, the Thunder’s defensive stopper, shuffles by in sandals. It’s mid-January, and the Thunder have surged into the playoff (well, play-in) picture, while Gilgeous-Alexander, with a recent scoring binge, has stormed into the All-NBA conversation. Oklahoma City had the NBA’s youngest roster—an average of 23 years, 51 days—on opening night, and the 24-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander is the centerpiece. He’s an elite scorer whom the Thunder are banking on to slip into a role once occupied by Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook to reload a former title contender.

In a preseason team meeting two years ago, Thunder general manager Sam Presti spoke bluntly about the challenge. The team was young. Inexperienced. In a small market. A revival would take time. But there would be what Presti termed “catalyst moments”—a come-from-behind victory, an unlikely win—that they would remember when they got there. To SGA, those words resonated. “It’s a clean slate,” he says. “It’s obviously a lot because it’s a burden, but it’s also a really good opportunity to be at the start of something and trail-blaze in this new era.”

SGA could be the first Thunder player to average 30 points per game in six seasons :: Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

In a way, Gilgeous-Alexander is an ideal cornerstone for the Thunder rebuild. He isn’t looking to speed up the process. He loves the process.

Hamilton, a port city in hockey-centric eastern Canada, is also a hotbed for hoops, or at least that’s how Gilgeous-Alexander remembers it. His father, Vaughn Alexander, a construction worker, renovated the top, outdoor level of a nearby vacant garage into a full court. Shai spent countless hours there in the summer, firing a worn-down ball into chain-link nets, playing pickup games from dawn to dusk. His basketball education came by way of YouTube. Allen Iverson’s crossover. Kobe Bryant’s fadeaways. Dwyane Wade’s Eurosteps. He’d watch, rewatch and then practice the moves relentlessly. In the icy winters, whenever Gilgeous-Alexander and his friends, including Castillanes, couldn’t get into gyms, they would work on their ballhandling in the basements of their homes.

It didn’t come easy for Shai. As a freshman in high school, he was cut from the equivalent of the junior varsity team. According to Washington, the coach gave a spot to his son instead. Gilgeous-Alexander didn’t sulk. Assigned to the ninth-grade squad, he dominated. When he hit his growth spurt—Gilgeous-Alexander sprouted to 6'2" the summer before his sophomore year and was 6'6" as a senior—he blended size into his skill set.

Washington showed him film of Rod Strickland, a former NBA guard who leaned on pace and angles to get to the rim. As a senior, SGA received an offer from Kentucky—only after he sent a letter, through Washington, asking for one. It took 15 games—and an injury to Quade Green—for John Calipari to install him as a starter. “He just worked,” says Joel Justus, a former Calipari assistant. “Extra weight workouts. Extra film sessions. Extra meetings with tutors. Extra shots with managers. He took advantage of every opportunity. Shai got more out of the University of Kentucky than we got out of him.”

The ability to be undeterred, friends say, is SGA’s greatest strength. “He just keeps moving forward,” says Alexander-Walker. “There’s a peace of mind that he plays with.” His mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, a former Olympic sprinter who competed in 1992 for Antigua and Barbuda, instilled that quality in him. “She built him mentally to never feel sorry for himself,” says Washington. Teacher picking on you at school? Learn the answers. Commit a turnover on the court? Make up for it on the defensive end.

Texts from Charmaine to the Kentucky coaching staff were routine. Not to plead for more playing time. But to keep her son humble when he got the starting gig. “She set a tone for how my approach is,” says Gilgeous-Alexander. “Because if you attack things on the nose and you don’t try to beat around the bush, then that’s how you get through it easier.”

Drafted by the Clippers, SGA absorbed lessons in leadership from then coach Doc Rivers. He spent hours working on the midrange game with assistant coach Sam Cassell. After playing with Chris Paul for one season in Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander hired a chef to help him mirror Paul’s disciplined approach. When the NBA resumed the 2019–20 season in the Orlando bubble, Presti gave Gilgeous-Alexander a book, Zen in the Martial Arts, by Joe Hyams.

“It’s about staying the course,” says Gilgeous-Alexander. “Not everything is going to translate the next day and the next week and the next month. You’re not going to go at a steady uphill the whole time. You’re going to go down. You’re going to hit a plateau. You’re going to be stuck for a little bit. But no matter what, as long as you keep getting better, working hard, whatever it is you’re doing in whatever profession, whatever situation, you will get there.”

His approach is paying off. SGA is having a breakout season. He averaged 30 points per game in each of the first five months. On Sunday, Gilgeous-Alexander returned from a five-game absence due to a variety of injuries, to score 38. (The Thunder went 1–4 without him but beat the Jazz 129–119 in his return to remain a half game out of the final play-in spot in the West.)

Gilgeous-Alexander has become one of the NBA’s most prolific paint scorers. “He has a knack for getting there whenever he wants,” says Wizards coach Wes Unseld Jr. Not with the burst of Ja Morant or the handle of Kyrie Irving. Like Strickland, he uses pace as a weapon. “That became his superpower,” says Washington. He’s become proficient with the floater. His ability to draw contact is James Harden–esque. “He’s really good at finding your hands,” says Dort. And he’s efficient. “Shai is so fundamental. He has such great footwork that you sometimes just don’t know what he’s going to do.”

It’s easy to see why Oklahoma City, which in August 2021 gave him a five-year max extension worth at least $173 million, is so invested. It’s been 11 years since the Thunder’s last—and only—Finals appearance. They have built an enviable young core and see Gilgeous-Alexander as the ideal player to lead it. Inside the locker room, OKC coach Mark Daigneault says SGA is “contagious” and “ruthlessly disciplined,” with teammates eager to follow him. His recent success hasn’t changed him, either. Says Daigneault, “It’s almost like the success reinforces his process to himself.”

In tennis, too. Gilgeous-Alexander isn’t looking to compete professionally on the hardcourt, but that doesn’t mean he’s not competitive. Last fall, Dort played him and won. SGA begrudgingly confirms the account, with a disclaimer: “He will never beat me again.” Turns out tennis is like anything else. Work hard. Get better. See results.