If the NBA’s central tension in the 2010s revolved around a desire to create space, the 2020s have been about finding new ways to exist within it. And so, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has established himself as the league’s Most Valuable Player by cementing his status as its purest hooper.
As the frontman of a historically great Oklahoma City Thunder team, Gilgeous-Alexander is an astonishing player, averaging 32.7 points on 51.9 percent shooting and making a case as one of the greatest scorers in NBA history. This season, he became the only guard to ever score more than 45 points per 100 possessions while making more than half their shots.
There’s a paradoxical economy and boundlessness to his game. Like an NFL offensive coordinator or magician, he hides simplicity under layers of misdirection and uncertainty. An eely, double-jointed ball handler, he lives in the space between dribbles, carving out paths to the rim with feints and stutter steps. He plays in swing time, moving with a rhythm that defenders can’t anticipate or understand. When his opponents stop, he starts; when they reach, he’ll teach.
With his retro-chic shot selection and three-point agnosticism, Gilgeous-Alexander operates with a precision and severity that resembles Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant more closely than any of his contemporaries. Beyond looking like Jordan, Gilgeous-Alexander plays like him—on a purely statistical level, there’s stunningly little daylight between Gilgeous-Alexander’s numbers this year and those of Michael Jordan at the same age.
In turn, Gilgeous-Alexander’s individual dominance drives the Thunder’s collective dominance. Despite being one of the youngest and least expensive teams in the league, the Thunder ran up the highest point differential in NBA history during the regular season, outscoring teams by 12.87 points per game. In the playoffs, they’ve been even better, bumping their margin of victory up to 14.08 points per game.
With Gilgeous-Alexander at the helm, the Thunder never have to compromise or concede—he’s such an additive force that he boosts any and all lineups. Center-less miniball lineups work because SGA can handle just about every defensive assignment; hulking two-center configurations thrive because he can frack points from even the narrowest, most brackish wells.
At this point, it’s no longer a question whether Gilgeous-Alexander is the most valuable player of 2025 as much as whether he’s one of the most valuable players of all time. By expected Estimated Plus-Minus, he’s having the best season by a guard since Stephen Curry in 2017; his Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus is the highest in the history of Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus. Almost single-handedly, SGA turns Oklahoma City’s chittering retinue of Jalens into a juggernaut—when he’s on the court, the Thunder outscore opponents by 16.9 points per 100 possessions.
Beyond the stats, though, Gilgeous-Alexander is emblematic of the NBA’s new post-math era. Now that the most important metrics are calculated rather than observed, the language of statistics has lost its descriptive power: EPM and the like are considerably less intuitive than a made shot or a rebound or a steal. Suddenly, the defining question of the 2020s isn’t a strategic one, but an aesthetic one: how do you find beauty inside arithmetic?
As the traditional star-making apparatuses have grown increasingly irrelevant, aura is all that’s left. Nike can no longer mint mega-stars with clever ad campaigns. The ESPN pundit class is too busy running for president and defaming teenage girls; glossy Sports Illustrated cover stories have been replaced by player podcast slop. The next face of the NBA won’t be anointed by institutional decree, but rather, by the fervor of their stans.
On the most superficial level, “aura,” as a concept, means you’re handsome. It means you wear stylish clothes and wear them well as you walk down the pre-game tunnel. To a degree, aura aligns with actual basketball ability (it’s hard to seem like a chill guy when you’re shooting 5/17), but it’s largely an aesthetic quality. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.
Accordingly, Gilgeous-Alexander proves that aura is more than just a four-letter word. Indeed, it’s the currency of modern NBA stardom. This is a player with fan-cams, not mixtapes. He doesn’t have rivalries, he has meat-offs.
More, really, aura is the most incisive and intuitive way of understanding how basketball works. On a possession by possession basis, the game is governed by feeling as much as it is by fact. In this sense, a SGA isolation produces fewer points per possession than OKC’s overall offense, but opponents still spring panicked double teams at him as soon as he crosses half-court. He’s a low-wattage spot-up shooter, yet defenders cling to him away from the ball; offenses steer clear of him, even if his merely very good on-ball defense pales in comparison to his great work off-ball. His mere presence intimidates teams into self-sabotage. His value is the psychic injury that he inflicts on his opponent. For Gilgeous-Alexander, stardom is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Throughout the Thunder’s playoff run, Gilgeous-Alexander's unwavering cool has been the bulwark against the inherent swings of playoff basketball, providing a floor that’s higher than just about any other team’s ceiling. Even as the Nuggets twisted themselves into novel zone defenses across an unexpectedly nervy seven-game series, SGA occupied his familiar narrow band of excellence, averaging nearly 30 points per game on 52.9 percent shooting. After just two games in the Western Conference Finals, he’s already declawed the Timberwolves’ physical defense, repeatedly drawing fouls while Minnesota wrestle with the ontological limits of the NBA rulebook.
Against Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder’s opponents have to discover a new way of being. Thanks to SGA, the Thunder only have to be themselves. Their whole lives are consistent.