Zach Kram
The Oklahoma City Thunder‘s 103-91 victory in Game 7 of the NBA Finals on Sunday was a collective coronation for the franchise, which won its first title since moving to OKC.
It was also a coronation for star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who just capped one of the NBA history’s most successful individual seasons with 29 points and 12 assists in the finale, becoming only the fifth player with a 20-10 performance in Game 7 of the Finals.
In the 2024-25 campaign, Gilgeous-Alexander won the scoring title, the MVP and the championship while leading his team to the best-ever point differential. And he could soon finish this wonderful year by signing a four-year, $293.4 million extension, which would give him the highest average salary in the history of the sport.
Gilgeous-Alexander is still just 26 years old, but he’s rapidly rising the list of all-time greats. He and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are the only players in NBA history to win MVP, Finals MVP and a scoring title by age 26. (Bob Pettit would have this trifecta, too, but the Finals MVP award didn’t exist yet when he was the best player on the title-winning St. Louis Hawks in 1958.)
On the heels of his historic accomplishment and Oklahoma City’s crowning moment, let’s analyze Gilgeous-Alexander’s surprising ascent, budding legacy and lofty statistical comps.
SGA passed NBA legends on way to the title
Gilgeous-Alexander faced long odds to reach this NBA peak. He was the 30th-ranked recruit in his high school class, behind 10 prospects who didn’t make it to the NBA. In his lone college season, he wasn’t even the highest-scoring freshman on his own team, finishing second behind future lottery bust Kevin Knox II.
And although Gilgeous-Alexander was himself a lottery pick, at No. 11, he was traded twice in his first year as an NBA player: first on draft night, as the Charlotte Hornets flipped his rights to the LA Clippers for Miles Bridges, and then the following summer, as part of Oklahoma City’s return for Paul George. Despite impressing in his first NBA season, he made only second-team All-Rookie, as Marvin Bagley III grabbed the final spot on the first team.
SGA is not the most obscure MVP winner and champion. Just this decade, Nikola Jokic (who was drafted in the second round) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (who stumbled into playing basketball as a teenager in Greece) have him beat.
But for an indication of how far Gilgeous-Alexander has surpassed expectations, note that during the 2018 predraft process, ESPN chose Shaun Livingston and Patrick McCaw as his comps — two players who never averaged double-digit points in a single season in their careers. (Both Livingston and McCaw were coming off championship wins with the Warriors in 2018.)
Seven years later, Gilgeous-Alexander is a surefire Hall of Famer even if he never plays another game. Derrick Rose is the only retired MVP in league history who’s not in the Hall, and Gilgeous-Alexander’s résumé far outstrips that of Rose, who never made another All-NBA team after his breakthrough in 2011.
More remarkable is how Gilgeous-Alexander now measures against many of the best players in league history. Compared to guards who made the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team, he already has as many first-team All-NBA nods (three) as Isiah Thomas, Steve Nash, Allen Iverson and Tiny Archibald. And SGA has more than Lenny Wilkens, Russell Westbrook, Dwyane Wade, John Stockton, Gary Payton, Pete Maravich, Earl Monroe, Reggie Miller, Damian Lillard, Sam Jones, Hal Greer, Dave Bing and Ray Allen.
In other words, Gilgeous-Alexander isn’t merely a surefire Hall of Famer, but a top-50-or-so player, depending on how one weighs peak value against overall career value. At 26, he doesn’t have the sort of overall counting stats that many of those aforementioned legends possess.
Yet with first-, second- and fifth-place MVP finishes, Gilgeous-Alexander already ranks 35th in career MVP award shares — a measure of the percentage of possible votes that a player received. One more decent season would vault him into the top 30 on the all-time MVP shares leaderboard. Two more strong seasons would likely push him into the top 20.
SGA’s supreme scoring skills
Gilgeous-Alexander is a well-rounded star — he led the league in steals last season — but his greatest skill is scoring. He’s now one of 15 players in NBA history to average at least 30 points in three separate seasons.
The Thunder guard compounds his impressive volume scoring with elite efficiency, thanks to his midrange mastery, finishing finesse and ability to convert his many free throw attempts at a near-90% clip. Gilgeous-Alexander and Adrian Dantley are the only players in NBA history with at least three seasons of 30 points per game on 62% or better true shooting.
Granted, scoring efficiency is higher now than ever before, so Gilgeous-Alexander’s true shooting is partly a reflection of leaguewide context. But that evolution just means he has taken advantage of his surroundings to become one of the most efficient high-volume scorers ever.
Gilgeous-Alexander excels in all of the most important play types in the modern NBA. Over the past three seasons, per GeniusIQ, he ranks second out of 128 players with at least 300 isolations in points per iso. He also ranks fourth out of 100 players with at least 1,500 screens as the ball handler in points per pick. (Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton is first in both categories.) And Gilgeous-Alexander is the league’s undisputed driving king, leading in that category every season; over the past half-decade, he’s more than 1,000 total drives ahead of second-place Luka Doncic.
High point totals don’t always go hand in hand with postseason triumphs; Michael Jordan famously didn’t win a championship in his three highest-scoring seasons. Yet Gilgeous-Alexander has paired that individual success with even greater team success. Since the invention of the shot clock, only Gilgeous-Alexander, Jordan (six times), Shaquille O’Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have won the scoring title and the championship in the same season.
And SGA has them beat in actual scoring: His 32.7 points per game in the 2024-25 regular season are the most for any player in NBA history who won a championship that season, edging out Jordan’s 32.6 points per game in 1992-93.
Gilgeous-Alexander also narrowly beats Jordan in the highest usage rate for a champion, at 34.8% to Jordan’s 34.7% in 1992-93.
Speaking of Jordan, because his name has come up a lot in these lists of historical comps, here is a downright sacrilegious chart, comparing Gilgeous-Alexander’s past three seasons to Jordan’s from 1991 to 1993 — arguably the most successful three-season run by a guard in NBA history.
Jordan won three titles in this span to Gilgeous-Alexander’s one, of course, and he was a superior defender, with All-Defensive first-team honors in each of those three seasons. But on offense, their numbers are eerily similar, including identical points-per-game figures, down to the decimal point, and the exact same league-adjusted efficiency figure.
What’s next for SGA’s legacy?
Amid the rightful celebration of Oklahoma City’s comprehensive roster construction, with all the shrewd trades, undrafted finds and clever extensions, Gilgeous-Alexander’s presence seems almost undersold.
Yet imagine, for a moment, a world in which the Thunder had pulled off the same George blockbuster without Gilgeous-Alexander included. A team with Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren and a bushel of picks would still be full of promise — but would that multiversal iteration of the Thunder be anything better than, say, a Western Conference version of the Orlando Magic, with Williams and Holmgren as young rising stars, a la Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner?
They certainly wouldn’t be NBA champions with the best regular-season point differential in league history. Depth and youth are great fun, but ultimately, winning the title requires an MVP-level talent, and that’s the greatest advantage Gilgeous-Alexander gives the Thunder. He’s the main reason they vaulted so quickly from rebuilding to hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
However, all that depth and youth, to say nothing of rapidly improving sidekicks Williams and Holmgren, should prove vital to burnish Gilgeous-Alexander’s legacy. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, because for SGA to rise higher up the NBA’s all-time ranks, he will essentially require more championships. That’s a difficult task in the modern NBA, which has had a record seven different champions in seven years. But Oklahoma City is the best-positioned team since the mid-2010s Golden State Warriors to use its first title to initiate a dynasty.
NBA fans have been spoiled by numerous all-time greats in recent years, with Jokic, Antetokounmpo and, of course, LeBron James and Stephen Curry winning titles and multiple MVP trophies. It’s far too early to place Gilgeous-Alexander on their historical pedestal.
Yet given his youth, accomplishments to date and opportunity for sustained team success, that pedestal is his for the taking.
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