Canada's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is about to complete one of the greatest seasons in NBA history
The Oklahoma City Thunder can win the NBA championship tonight with a victory over the Pacers in Game 6 of the Finals in Indiana.
This is likely to happen. With Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton potentially sidelined due to a calf injury, the league-best Thunder are favoured by six points, implying they have about a 2-in-3 chance of hoisting the Larry O'Brien Trophy tonight. If they don't, they'll get another crack in Game 7 back in Oklahoma City, where they'll be even bigger favourites.
A Thunder championship would presumably result in Canadian superstar guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander being voted the Most Valuable Player of the Finals. The current betting odds for this award suggest the regular-season MVP's chances are higher than 85 per cent, and the only other OKC player with a real shot is Jalen Williams. He scored a series-high 40 points in Game 5 but is averaging 25.8 in the Finals compared to 32.4 for Gilgeous-Alexander, who's just a shade off his league-leading 32.7 from the regular season.
This puts SGA on the verge of completing not just the best season ever by a Canadian, but one of the greatest by any player in NBA history. The 26-year-old from Hamilton, Ont., can become only the fourth man ever to lead the league in scoring, capture the regular-season MVP, win a championship ring and add the Finals MVP in the same season. You may have heard of the others: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal and Michael Jordan.
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Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA's all-time scoring leader until LeBron James surpassed him two years ago, was the first to do it — in 1971 with the Milwaukee Bucks, when he was still known as Lew Alcindor. Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever (sorry, LeBron), accomplished it four times during his six championships with the Chicago Bulls (1991, '92, '96, '98). O'Neal, the incomparable big man who won three straight Finals MVPs with the Lakers, was the last guy to join the club, in 2000 with L.A.
In each of those instances except for Jordan in 1991, they also led their team to the league's best record in the regular season. Gilgeous-Alexander ticked that box by powering OKC to a 68-14 mark — four wins better than any other club. Plus, he was voted a starter for the All-Star game, an All-NBA First Teamer and the MVP of the Western Conference final.
At first blush, you might think the scoring-title/MVP/championship/Finals-MVP quadruple would be highly correlated. After all, star players in pro basketball have a bigger effect on their team's fortunes than in any other major sport. So shouldn't the team with the best and highest-scoring player in the league win the title more often than not?
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The extreme exclusivity of the Jordan/Shaq/Kareem club shows that it's much harder than it looks. In fact, Gilgeous-Alexander is the first regular-season MVP in nine years to even reach the Finals, and he'd be the first in a decade to win the title. You have to go back even further, to O'Neal a quarter century ago, to find a regular-season scoring champion who went on to win a ring that same season.
This speaks to the difficulty, in the modern NBA, of playing at an MVP level throughout a gruelling 82-game regular season and still having enough left in the tank to lead your team through the two-month playoff gauntlet. It's probably not a coincidence that current superstars Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic won their MVPs in seasons where they did not make it to the Finals, much less win a ring.
Are you not entertained?
Given the rarefied air he's in right now, it's kind of puzzling that Gilgeous-Alexander isn't a bigger deal among basketball fans. Despite the fact that he scores in bunches as a guard (in general, the most aesthetically pleasing position), some accuse him of being a "free-throw merchant" who has mastered the dark art of drawing fouls and gets many of his points from the line. Other nitpickers say he skirts the rules on offensive fouls, often using his non-ball-handling arm to ward off defenders when he's driving to the bucket.
But the overarching complaint from SGA critics seems to be that they don't find him all that interesting, either as a player or a personality.
Feeling underwhelmed by the best player in the world is not a new phenomenon among basketball fans. Though they play different positions, Gilgeous-Alexander has been likened to Tim Duncan, the businesslike, fundamentally sound power forward who won five championships, three Finals MVPs and two regular-season MVPs over 19 seasons with the San Antonio Spurs. Despite his undeniable greatness, Duncan never connected with fans to the degree that flashier contemporaries like Shaq, Kobe Bryant or even the far less successful Allen Iverson did. There's an echo of that in how today's fans seem to prefer the likes of Jokic, the Lakers' Luka Doncic and even, at the moment, the Pacers' Haliburton.
Nothing against those guys, but there should be room in everyone's heart for SGA. He scores. He passes. He defends. He hits big shots. And he shows up to work: in an age where every fan complains about load management, SGA played in 76 of OKC's 82 games this season. That's more games than every other top-10 scorer except Minnesota's Anthony Edwards.
The thing to understand about SGA is that he doesn't concern himself with playing TikTok basketball — follower count by damned. Instead, like Duncan in the pre-social-media days, he's laser-focused on doing whatever it takes to win.
"The way I see it," he said the other day. "Winning is all that matters."
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