The Way of Shai

The Oklahoma City Thunder star has transformed into one of the
NBA’s best players, but it isn’t always clear how or why he’s so
effective. How did an elusive guard best known for his brakes take
over the league? “He manipulates people,” says Steve Nash. “He is
able to put you in a position to take the bait, and then he exploits you.”
By Danny Chau Feb 13, 2024, 8:17am EST

Getty Images/Ringer Illustration

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S
hai

Shai

Gilgeous-Alexander is universally regarded as the NBA’s most

fashionable player. It would be enough to be appreciated as such by
peers and fans, but it’s another thing entirely to be named GQ’s most
stylish man of the year in 2022, full stop. Last year, he leveled up once
more at the Met Gala, donning one of the most elegant ensembles of
the night: a textured and multilayered study of black and white in
dedication to the late designer Karl Lagerfeld by way of Thom Browne.
The ability to gawk at his latest pregame outfits is one of the perks
outlined in the latest advert for the NBA’s official app. Shai has
become an attraction all to himself, on and off the court. The
Oklahoma City Thunder star has a clear eye and devotion to fashion,
but what most people gravitate toward is the confidence of his
style—the connective tissue that bridges his identities as aesthete and
athlete. Style is, in a way, one of the objects of athletics in general: an
ever-evolving understanding of one’s dimensions and how they
behave in space. Style reveals itself over time. That isn’t to say one’s
style is always beautiful, but it is, for the moment, honest. To track the
movement of Gilgeous-Alexander is to witness a person who knows
who he is.

The NBA, Ranked

 Click here to read the The Ringer’s 2023-24 NBA rankings.
It was his parents who instilled in young Shai a sense of decorum. “In
my family, we always were taught to be presentable coming out of the
house,” Gilgeous-Alexander has said. How one presents to the world
is a language unto itself—unspoken, but seen and felt. SGA’s outfits
over the years have given hints of the motifs that shade his
self-expression. Much of athlete style over the past four decades has
been built around the iconography of the sneaker—to wear Air
Jordans is, in some way, to be in proximity to Him, and you can tell a
lot about a person from their favorite Jordan design. Contrarily, Shai
often opts to envelop his feet entirely, shrouded by big, voluminous
trousers that hold their shape in defiance of physics, by pants that coil
and stack under their own weight. When he spoke to GQ at New York
Fashion Week a few years ago, Gilgeous-Alexander claimed he liked
to keep his footwear “mysterious.” It’s hard not to wonder whether this
is a string that can pull us closer toward a more unified theory of Shai:
Is it the footwear or his footwork that is truly elusive?

G
ilgeous-Alexander

Gilgeous-Alexander

was born in Toronto but hails from Hamilton, roughly an hour south
along the westernmost contours of Lake Ontario. It’s a city that reveals
itself from the highway through the cloud factories by the harbor:
Endless plumes of steam billow from the steel mills that produce a
majority of Canada’s supply of the alloy. A decade ago, researchers
found that cirrus clouds begin as ice crystals that specifically form
around “seeds” of mineral and metal dust particles in the upper
atmosphere—a good percentage of the metal particles in the air are
the result of industrial emissions. It takes a whole lot of grit to create
something seemingly weightless.

When you’re staring from below, these clouds appear as wispy streaks
and striations suspended in air. Serene. Floating. Blush-toned
brushstrokes refract the vivid hues of a sunset. From above, at cloud
level, the scene is much different: sheets of ice crystals the size of
skyscrapers, violently dragged across the horizon at more than 100
miles per hour. A reminder that velocity is a matter of perspective, that
life’s deceptions can’t always be rendered by the naked eye. “It’s a lot
different than [on] TV,” former Thunder guard Tre Mann said when
describing Gilgeous-Alexander’s style of play in 2022. “He looks like
he’s moving so slow and calm, but when you’re guarding him it’s
different. He’s fast, quick, really shifty.”

Clouds can block light from even the brightest star. One of the most
impressive plays of Gilgeous-Alexander’s career—which has
coalesced into perennial MVP candidacy even though he’s just
25—barely registers as perceptible. In a mid-November game against
the Golden State Warriors, SGA made Steph Curry disappear. After
Shai came to an immediate stop at the free throw line on a drive from
the top of the arc, he noticed Steph’s gambit: a hard and fast swipe
with the left hand. In a single motion, without any momentum on his
side, Gilgeous-Alexander shifted all of his weight onto his back foot as
he reclined his upper body and dribbled the ball behind his back—an
eerie feat of balance and core strength that effectively made Curry
lurch at a ghost. It was as if the court itself had been tilted on its axis.
Virtual insanity. For a moment, Gilgeous-Alexander appeared to be
operating in bullet time:

The immediate impulse for fans watching the highlight was to poke fun
at Curry, who has spent his entire career being questioned about his
defensive acumen. Far less attention was paid to the self-possessed
sorcery on the other side of the ball. Such has been the story of SGA’s
career. He is among the most prolific one-on-one scorers in the
NBA—outrageously efficient in isolation, post-ups, transition, and the
pick-and-roll—but his style lends an almost mystical air, as though it
isn’t always clear how or why he is as effective as he is. There is a
certitude in Gilgeous-Alexander’s game, even as it projects as
off-kilter, even when the player himself encodes his style as
uncertainty. “I think my advantage comes from not knowing what I’m
going to do,” Gilgeous Alexander has said. “Unorthodox. Offbeat.
Slithery. Being unpredictable and doing things that are not seen a lot.”
ere was a sense from him at that age. There was a
m, a confidence. I’m running my race, and I’ll get to
finish line. I think just his feel for the game was so
dent. Even then, he never got sped up. He was
er in a real hurry.” —Steve Nash
SGA has led the NBA in drives per game in each of the past four
seasons. Nearly three-fourths of his points this season have come
from such possessions. He isn’t the likeliest leader of the statistical
category, nor is he what the mind’s eye would conceive of as the
NBA’s leading scorer over these past two seasons. Every other player
averaging 30 or more points this season—Joel Embiid, Luka Doncic,
Giannis Antetokounmpo—possesses a bulky frame that signals the
strength to carry a heavy burden and endure the inevitable bumps and
bruises. Shai—at a long, lean, and tapered 6-foot-6—decidedly does
not. Still, he gets to his spots anytime he wants to, at his own pace.
His body control seems guided by compass. Because he intuitively
feels the proper alignment of his own body, his spins, his footwork, his
staccato steps that drag defenders into a sense of imbalance—they all
play out as mini dramas with a clear resolution. He can always bring
himself back to true north faster than anyone can knock him off his
path.

G
ilgeous-Alexander
Gilgeous-Alexander

is now in his fifth season in Oklahoma City, but Hamilton remains

home. It’s where he returns every summer to reset. It’s where he
works out with his friend and personal trainer Nem Ilic, in a residential
cul-de-sac where Ilic converted his garage into a professional gym.
And it’s where a hooper from the Bronx made a new life, of all places,
creating a haven for youth basketball in the area, which has become a
pipeline to success at the highest levels of competition.

Dwayne Washington remembers meeting Gilgeous-Alexander the

summer before his eighth-grade year. Shai—a gangly 5-foot-5
teenager with the same size 13 shoes he wears now—was coming in
for summer basketball workouts. He still had his football pads on from
practice. He played running back and quarterback, positions reserved
for those who have a knack for making decisions with the ball in their
hands. Washington is the CEO and director of UPLAY Canada, a
basketball academy in Hamilton that has fostered the development of
much of Ontario’s NBA talent boom, including RJ Barrett, Shaedon
Sharpe, and Andrew Nembhard. He was a New York City kid who
learned the game from neighborhood legend and 17-year NBA
veteran Rod Strickland—the godfather of Kyrie Irving. The pursuit of a
teaching degree brought him out to Hamilton, where he’s stationed
himself ever since. For a time, he was Shai’s phys ed teacher, his
skills trainer, and his club and high school team coach. In the handful
of years they worked together, they worked together. Every day. Hours
at a time. “It was very tough,” Washington told me. “It wasn’t nice. It
was very intense. I couldn’t work kids now the way I worked with him.
But he could take a lot. He was a mental grinder, so to speak.”

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But even Shai was annoyed by the tedium of glasswork, a little slice of
home that Washington brought with him to Canada. New York City
basketball is about extracting a sense of flair out of dogged
pragmatism. It is about finding the beauty in adjustments made within
an environment: on outdoor courts with compromised hoops in the
windy, frigid cold, in indoor gyms with perilously low ceilings. It’s about
making use of the things that are given to you, lest they be taken
away. Glasswork was a lesson in physics disguised as a modified
Mikan drill. Make layups off the backboard, using all parts of your
hand—the inside, the outside, the fingertips—guiding the ball to each
quadrant of the glass. Fifty times. Arc the ball high. Fifty times. Spin
the ball. Fifty times. Develop the sensory memory of how to influence
the trajectory of the ball in real time. Then do it again with the other
hand.

The two spent lunch breaks watching clips of Chris Paul, Steve Nash,
Andre Miller, and, yes, Strickland. Floor generals with physical
limitations but supreme control over what they could control. The hope
was that Gilgeous-Alexander would top out at 6-foot-1. “Shai having
really long strides and his gross motor skills still growing, we couldn’t
assume he would be athletic,” Washington said. “But you could still
manipulate the ball screen, so you’re using your brain. Obviously, as
he started to grow, he was able to get to certain places but still didn’t
have to rush because he was using his brain more.”

By the end of his sophomore year in high school, the writing was on
the wall: To keep developing, he’d have to test himself against higher
competition Stateside, just like every other Canadian prospect
following their hoop dreams. Shai and his cousin Nickeil both landed
in Chattanooga, Tennessee, playing their final two years of high
school for coach Zach Ferrell at, of all places, Hamilton Heights
Christian Academy—and sharing a room at the Ferrell residence.
Together, the cousins helped Hamilton Heights become a national
 powerhouse in their time there; the school they repped on the front of
their jerseys, if only by coincidence, was a constant reminder of home.

hindsight, the fact that he was able to stop on a

e and make quick moves even though his stride
s so long—that shouldn’t have happened.”
Dwayne Washington
Of course, up north, Team Canada kept an eye out. At the end of
Shai’s junior year, he was invited to the Senior Men’s National Team
training camp for the upcoming 2016 Olympic qualifying tournament in
Manila. It was there that Nash, then Team Canada’s general manager,
having retired from the NBA the year before, caught a glimpse of the
future. He saw something in Shai—before the University of Kentucky
commitment, hell, before Shai even turned 18. Something Nash didn’t
even see in himself at the same age. Nash first played for the
Canadian senior team at 17, but each promotion to a higher level of
competition presented a serious adjustment process. The future
two-time MVP recalled feeling rushed, sped up, less secure in his
decisions. And then there was Shai, still 17, competing for a senior
team roster spot among NBA veterans, unfazed. “There was a sense
from him at that age,” Nash told me. “There was a calm, a confidence.
I’m running my race, and I’ll get to the finish line. I think just his feel for
the game was so evident. Even then, he never got sped up. He was
never in a real hurry.”

Gilgeous-Alexander made the team as a sort of 12th-man apprentice.

“I was really young. I didn’t play a minute in a game. I was pissed
about it,” Gilgeous-Alexander recalled last summer, during the 2023
FIBA World Cup. Still, he’d exceeded all expectations. He’d grown to
6-foot-4. A few months after the tournament, he’d commit to Kentucky.
By the time he stepped foot on campus, he’d grown another 2 inches:
6-foot-6, a sort of golden mark of height. Jordan was listed as 6-foot-6.
So were Kobe and Vince. But Shai had the wiring of a player much,
much smaller and far less athletically gifted. There are
transformational origin myths like those of Anthony Davis or Zion
Williamson—players whose games changed irrevocably when they hit
late growth spurts and whose newfound athleticism allowed them to
explore the outer limits of basketball itself. Gilgeous-Alexander’s never
related to those narratives. When asked last year whether he’d
idolized LeBron James growing up, he demurred. “I never really liked
his game,” he said. “To me, when I was younger, he was just
super-athletic—I wasn’t that. He was 6-foot-8 and super strong, and I
wasn’t that, either.”

For Shai, it wasn’t about the powers he’d gained by growing taller; it
was about what he hadn’t lost. The angles he chose on drives, the
subtle shifts of the shoulders, the almost unnerving slow and steady
nature of it all. He maintained all the slight advantages he’d crafted for
himself—they were just a bit easier to pull off from a different vantage.
True to form, Gilgeous-Alexander was patient. He was the lowest
top-100 recruit of his class at Kentucky, but he finished the year as the
team’s most important player. He was a promising rookie for the Los
Angeles Clippers who was drafted outside the top 10 in 2018 and
ended up being the line in the sand of the Paul George trade, damn
near breaking Clippers executive Jerry West’s heart with the reality of
losing the beloved youngster. Shai arrived in OKC an unexpected,
fresh-faced heir tasked with filling the shoes that team legend Russell
Westbrook left behind, and he has since molded himself into a
first-team All-NBA star on the Thunder by playing his way. He stayed
the course. His new dimensions didn’t change the person or player
he’d always been.
“The worst thing is people not knowing what they can’t do,”
Washington said. “So when you’re a kid and you think you actually
can fly, you put a towel around your neck. You jump out the
second-floor window. You’re going to break your legs. You have to be
self-aware. So people who know they can’t fly, you can still say: What
can I do? Put the cape on and climb down. I’ll still get there. It’s very
elementary, but what it shows is knowing yourself and what you can
do, you find out that what looks like a perceived weakness is actually
a strength.”

B
ut

But

what is it about Shai? What is it, actually, that makes him one of the
NBA’s most idiosyncratic stars? What is that ineffable quality that has
defenses crumpling around him on his slaloms into the lane? Perhaps
the defining irony of Gilgeous-Alexander’s athletic makeup is that his
mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, who ran for Antigua and Barbuda in the
400-meter at the 1992 Olympics, kept the speed for herself. Shai’s jets
aren’t the first thing to come to mind when you think about his
game—they might not even be the fifth. Still, his mom’s athleticism
informs the player Shai is today. Her chosen event speaks volumes.
The 400-meter is about more than just speed. It’s a negotiation:
Maximum velocity is essential, yet it invariably concedes to
endurance. At some point in the sprint, the lactic acid buildup will burn
through you from the inside out. Did you pace yourself accordingly?
Do you have the resolve to push through? Shai inherited an acute
internal clock as much as he did the long strides, both of which enable
an uncanny level of precision in shifting gears and tempo—his most
notable skill. When you master time, you can obliterate it. “He knows
the race starts when he says so, and he’s able to dictate in that way,”
Nash said.

“And for someone with his frame, his skill level and
feel, to be able to add the different gears, the brakes
the balance, and that dexterity, it just opens up a wo
for him.” —Nash
With Shai, beginnings and endings blur completely. Over the past
decade, deceleration has become an increasingly vital piece of the
athleticism puzzle in NBA talent evaluation. P3, a sports science lab
that has a biomechanics testing database of nearly 1,000 NBA
players, was at the vanguard of that shift in thinking when it publicized
the all-world braking system that James Harden demonstrated in its
tests. It was the key to understanding how Harden—one of the
greatest scorers in the history of the game—created so much
separation from his defenders even though he’s an otherwise average
athlete.

And that new baseline understanding of athleticism shades how we

can view a player as unorthodox as SGA. “In hindsight, the fact that
he was able to stop on a dime and make quick moves even though his
stride was so long—that shouldn’t have happened,” Washington said,
thinking back to Shai’s younger days. “So that’s definitely a genetic
piece.”
Gilgeous-Alexander has not gone through P3’s battery of athletic
assessments, but it doesn’t take a biomechanics expert to notice
something different about the way he moves. (Though that helps.) I
asked Eric Leidersdorf, P3’s director of biomechanics, to explain
Gilgeous-Alexander’s unique athleticism through surrogates within the
lab’s database. He was able to identify two specific areas of interest:
ankle flexibility and braking ability that’s a standard deviation above
the norm. “Frankly, most guys tend to do one or the other really well,”
Leidersdorf said. “The list of guys who can do both very effectively is
pretty small. And I think that’s where Shai tends to stand out.”

The closest proxy in the database, Leidersdorf tells me, is Cleveland

Cavaliers point guard Darius Garland. It makes sense: Garland is a
similar stop-start savant whose stepback and step-through mechanics
are pristine. He is also 5 inches shorter than Gilgeous-Alexander—at
best. Turns out that was a theme in the P3 data set: Most of SGA’s
cohort was tiny by NBA standards. “I think that’s the other hidden
secret that he has, a hidden ingredient that he has access to,”
Leidersdorf said. “He has these movement skills, but he just has it in a
size package that’s bigger than most of the guys who fell through
these comparisons.”

Watch Gilgeous-Alexander play for long enough, and there will be

moments that leave you tilting your head in bewilderment, as though
invisible forces were at work. Defenders stumble, stagger, even bend
the knee to SGA as he stands perfectly still. Freeze the frame for a
second, just before Gilgeous-Alexander completes a stepback, and it
might look something like this:
Or this:

Or this:
 These deep-lunge stepbacks have become some of SGA’s most
effective maneuvers, leveraging his lower-body flexibility in tandem
with his ability to instantly negate his own forward momentum. Ilic,
Shai’s personal trainer back home in Hamilton, has focused on
incorporating explosive multidirectional lunge workouts, extending the
legs at a 45-degree angle rather than simply straight ahead—mirroring
the angle that Shai would naturally be in when dribbling between the
legs or executing a pullback dribble. The exercises play off what, to
Gilgeous-Alexander, is already instinctual. But there is a greater
command now, a power generated from within an uncommon position
that he didn’t possess before.

“It’s not just this impressive range of motion. It’s also the ability to
generate a considerable amount of decelerative force from these very
unique positions,” Leidersdorf said. “There are guys who’ve carved out
careers in the NBA, not because they’re the most explosive athletes,
but because they can produce force from positions that other athletes,
the guys who are guarding them, aren’t expecting them to produce
force from.”

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Of course, there is always a tension in doing things you shouldn’t be
able to do. Gilgeous-Alexander has dealt with significant foot and
ankle injuries in the past, missing a combined 50 games due to a torn
plantar fascia in 2021 and recurring ankle issues in 2022. When you
have access to angles that most aren’t physically privy to, there’s
always the risk of pushing things too close to the edge. To address
that, Ilic has had Shai running barefoot to strengthen the ligaments
and improve fluency in the pathways that connect the thousands of
nerve endings in his feet to his brain. Growing that connection—and
ensuring that his body’s internal lines of communication are as clear
and direct as possible—is how Shai maintains his advantage of
supreme balance and coordination. And so the work never ends. Ilic
flew to Indonesia with SGA for the 2023 FIBA World Cup to introduce
new workouts and activations for Shai’s feet and ankles that the
Thunder staff have carried into the season. “Our goal was to try and
make that foot essentially a little bit more pliable,” Ilic said. “A little bit
more willing or able to withstand all the forces that he produces with
his change of directions and with his abrupt stops.”

Perhaps there is no one who appreciates Shai’s unique gifts (and

dedication to maintenance) more than Nash, who has made a life’s
mission and Hall of Fame career out of maximizing his coordination
and reflexes. “Even at this incredible level, you still see great players
who don’t have the type of brakes or balance that Shai does. It sounds
common, but it’s extremely rare,” Nash said. “And for someone with
his frame, his skill level and feel, to be able to add the different gears,
the brakes, the balance, and that dexterity, it just opens up a world for
him.”
H
ere’s

Here’s

another irony of Gilgeous-Alexander’s game: Even though he’s

decidedly old school in the midrange-heavy shot diet he has within a
3-point-dominant NBA landscape, he occasionally has been painted
as an undeserving beneficiary of the NBA’s law enforcement in the
present era—when, to paraphrase Golden State Warriors head coach
Steve Kerr, defense is being legislated out of the game. SGA has
officially entered the gilded foul merchant class of NBA stars. Over the
past five seasons (since Gilgeous-Alexander was traded to OKC), only
seven players have taken more free throws than he has. At the very
top, by a comfortable margin, are two anomalies of size:
Antetokounmpo and Embiid. But the five players below them are all
perimeter-oriented players: Trae Young, Luka Doncic, DeMar
DeRozan, Jimmy Butler, James Harden. All players who have tapped
into the art of using a defender’s expectations against them. Over the
past three seasons, only Antetokounmpo and Embiid have taken more
free throws than the Thunder’s star.

But it’s hardly the case that SGA is serving as a well-worn stone at the
end of a slingshot, cynically hurtling into harm’s way. The fouls signify
his growth as a complete playmaker—he boasts a career-high assist
rate this season, while his free throw attempt rate has gone down from
last season. The Thunder are in the thick of a four-horse race for the
honor of being the best team in the Western Conference, a complete
reversal of fortune from the previous three losing seasons. Oklahoma
City has immaculately constructed itself around SGA, who has
become the unquestionable leader on a team with arguably the
brightest future in the league. Shai has fashioned himself into a
legitimate superstar with more options at his disposal than ever
before. And defenders still have only a split second to respond to an
increasingly complicated calculus.

“I mean, he’s got you in jail,” Nash said. “He can shoot off the bounce,
he can finish, he can pass. So what do you do if you’re a defender?
You play too tight, he can go by you. You try to stay tight enough and
strong enough that you can absorb the stepback—now he can go and
draw fouls because you’re overplaying him. He’s got you in a position
where however you decide to guard him, he has a counter. And then
the pump fakes and the length around the rim. To be a guard that’s
able to finish after a pump fake is uncanny.”

It’s entirely too much to process in such a short amount of time, made
even more difficult to read by the arrhythmic nature of his game. And
so the allegations persist, coming to a head after a late January
Thunder win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, when SGA (who
attempted 13 free throws that night) was called out by burgeoning rival
Anthony Edwards.

“It’s hard to [win] with the calls that Shai gets,” Edwards said. “It’s hard
to shut him down. You can’t touch him at any time of the game, so it’s
super hard to beat. That team is a good team, especially when they
get calls like that.”

Of course, the “foul merchant” label flattens the context of a player’s

efficacy, perpetuating a meme rather than serving as a true indictment
of their game. SGA understands the leverage he has over the
defense, the dissonance between optics and intent, as well as any
player in the league has since Harden’s MVP heyday. Someone with
his lithe build doesn’t typically invite physicality the way he does. That,
too, is a skill he’s worked tirelessly on.

“Here’s a 6-foot-6 point guard that is using the new rules to his
advantage,” said Olin Simplis, a renowned NBA skills trainer who has
worked with Gilgeous-Alexander since the predraft process in 2018.
“And he’s already a physical force, even when he didn’t add the
weight that he’s had and the strength that he’s had. He always played
with a level of toughness and force and attacks from his Kentucky
days. So he’s just taking full advantage of his abilities of his size and
the new rules, and I don’t see him slowing down anytime soon.”

There is a drill that Gilgeous-Alexander has done for years with

Simplis: SGA is strapped to a long resistance band, Simplis inside the
band and Shai on the far end. (“I’m pulling you,” Simplis said. “I’m a
big guy too.”) Outside the band is a defender who’s hounding Shai as
he executes in-game moves under what is essentially the pressure of
Jupiter’s gravity. It’s brutal and exhausting work, but it’s a drill tailored
to Gilgeous-Alexander’s particular skill set. “You’re working on playing
at your own pace and playing through contact because you can’t go
full speed,” Simplis said. “And so you’re getting used to the bumps
and the bruises while you’re still maintaining full control of the
basketball.”

If SGA boasts a signature move, it’s the bump stepback—a

culmination of all the training he’s done with both Ilic and Simplis.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s shoulder has always been an unexpectedly
devastating force of nature—just ask Danny Green about what it did to
him back in 2019, when SGA was a skin-and-bones rookie. But the
physicality of when Shai lowers his shoulder is mostly sleight of hand.
It’s not necessarily the bump that dislodges the defender; it’s what the
bump signals. SGA’s body language on a drive suggests forward
momentum, so the defender slides back accordingly. But upon
contact, in an almost simultaneous motion, Gilgeous-Alexander is
already slamming his brakes to create an exaggerated window of
separation. There is invariably a lag time for the defender as they
recalibrate—by then, it’s likely too late. This is nothing new. Nash is
quick to bring up that the bump stepback was 15-year NBA vet Sam
Cassell’s go-to move—Cassell, now a Celtics assistant coach, literally
has an instructional video on it. “Sam used to get it on that left block
and left shoulder into the chest, and as he hits your chest, he’s
dribbling and spinning back over the right shoulder for the fadeaway,”
Nash said. “And it looks like nothing. It’s almost an imperceivable
bump.”

But no one does it quite like Shai, if only because no one else can.
The single most illustrative play of SGA’s career to date might just be
the bump stepback he executed against hapless Latvian guard Arturs
Zagars at the 2023 FIBA World Cup:

Just as Gilgeous-Alexander’s shoulder makes contact with Zagars’s

chest, Shai adopts the mechanics of a tennis slide to decelerate,
angling his shin and ankle such that he can use the side of his foot as
a brake system. But while tennis players have ample room to come to
a stop, SGA controls the timing of his slide amid contact and spatial
constraints to the degree that he’s able to seamlessly pop back into
shooting position. The result? A frictionless stepback—an evolution of
a modern classic.

The rivalry brewing between Edwards and Gilgeous-Alexander is

compelling for myriad reasons, though it’s their contrasting aesthetics
of play that are most fascinating. Edwards is irrepressibly explosive,
with an athletic charisma that evokes a certain nostalgia—the kind that
would lead an NBA legend like Kevin Garnett to compare him to ’84
Jordan. There are no convenient parallels for SGA; all the lines he
draws run askew. But the more Gilgeous-Alexander has refined his
patterns of dominance, the more he has come to resemble another
all-time great: Novak Djokovic, an athlete whose otherworldly flexibility
and endurance have altered not only the way tennis is played, but the
ways in which each phase of the game could be conceived.

“I mean, if he’s not already, he’ll be the best Canadia

to ever play the game—and in short order.” —Nash
Nash—a lifelong tennis player and fan who has trained at Rafael
Nadal’s academy in Mallorca, Spain—indulged my uncommon
comparison: “I see what you mean—the limber flexibility. I think
Djokovic uses that dexterity, flexibility to go from defense to offense in
the blink of an eye. Shai kind of uses it to change gears,” Nash said.
“Novak’s never in a rush either. He kind of knows he can play
patty-cake for a minute here and lull you to sleep—a little bit of cat and
mouse. And he allows them to either make mistakes or play
themselves out of position. And that’s kind of what Shai does. He
manipulates people. He is able to put you in a position to take the bait,
and then he exploits you.

“I think that’s a very interesting analogy that only a few of your

readership will get.”

T
hat

That

must be it, right? That must be the Way of Shai. As he bends,

defenses break. The style is the substance. Shai’s successes are
inextricable from his failures. He didn’t make his high school JV team
as a freshman, missing the cut in favor of the coach’s son. His mom
did not allow him to feel sorry for himself. “You could either cry about it
or you could make them regret it,” she told him.

The world-class stepback? There was a time when he just couldn’t

crack it. “That stepback initially—he wasn’t that good, so we would do
it at night,” Simplis said. “He didn’t shoot it, and it didn’t feel
comfortable to him.” Night after night, practicing after the actual
workout, throughout the predraft process, throughout his rookie
campaign with the Clippers.

When Gilgeous-Alexander first started working out with Ilic just before
the fateful trade that sent him to Oklahoma City and Paul George to
Los Angeles, Ilic looked at Shai incredulously. “Those first few days I
was kind of shocked, thinking, Damn, this guy just played 82 games in
an NBA season and he can barely hold a plank,” Ilic said. Ilic thought
he’d start off with something basic: lateral speed workouts with a
high-knee hurdle. Shai had no idea how to synchronize the movement
of his arms with his knees. “He started poorly with almost everything
that we’ve done,” Ilic said. “Everything was hard.”

This, more than anything else, is the Way of Shai: “I like failing,”
Gilgeous Alexander said last year. “I like being bad at something, or
not being where I want to be, and getting worse at it to then get better
at it. I like breaking things down. And then going crazy on it.”
That was the mentality that compelled Nash to take a chance on a
17-year-old on Team Canada’s senior men’s team for an Olympic
qualifying tournament. Shai’s approach resonated with the 18-year
veteran, an underdog and late bloomer his entire career. “It is a lot of
dirty work where it’s not pretty and you’ve got to stick with it. And if
you want to come out the other side, you’re going to have to have a lot
of ugly days—days where other players would be like, I’m just not
good at that, I’ll stop doing that,” Nash said. “But if you’re able to
persevere, you get this breakthrough and then you’ve added
something profound to your game or your skill set.”

Ilic and SGA joke about those early days. It never takes too long for
Shai to master the routines. They looked at a picture of Shai from his
rookie season. “His legs have probably doubled in size,” Ilic said. For
Simplis, working with Shai has always been easy. If anything, it’s put
the pressure back on him: to match the level of dedication, to bring his
own A game. “His level of focus towards the game of basketball is in
line with the great ones,” Simplis said of Gilgeous-Alexander. “I’ve
never had the privilege to work with Michael, but I’ve witnessed Kobe
work out multiple times. And I know it’s premature, but that thing right
there that they have, this kid has.”

As for Nash, who, for decades, has stood alone as Canada

basketball’s guiding light, he couldn’t help but feel goosebumps
watching Gilgeous-Alexander at last summer’s World Cup, earning the
bronze medal and securing Canada’s first Olympic berth since 2000,
when Nash was captain. “What an amazing thing for me to watch this
generation, to watch Shai lead this generation and play at such an
incredibly high level,” Nash said. “I mean, if he’s not already, he’ll be
the best Canadian to ever play the game—and in short order.”

Gilgeous-Alexander has entered the conversations he’s always

dreamed of being a part of. “I want to be known as one of the best
players to play the game,” he’s said. “I’ve wanted that since I could
remember.” Could that claim be true? There is video of
Gilgeous-Alexander and his cousin Alexander-Walker playing in a
youth league circa 2008. They’re 9 years old. Was that dream with
him then? Nickeil (wearing no. 13) is the clear star of the clip: perfect
shooting mechanics; great vision and touch on overhead hook passes;
an exaggerated, low-to-the-ground defensive stance straight out of
martial arts class. Shai (wearing no. 11) is featured only once. He
lacks the panache of his cousin, but the seed from which he emerged
is there in the pixelated frames. Upon receiving a pass from Nickeil on
the left block, Shai throws a ball fake to confuse two defenders. He
takes a lethargic initial dribble before a more explosive, long-striding
second dribble to get around the defense for a layup. It’s a setup not
far removed from the way he confounds defenders in the NBA today.
It’s an impressive understanding of tempo shifts and how to prey on
expectations.

But it isn’t the work of a prodigy. If it weren’t for the benefit of

hindsight, there would be no meaning imbued in this fleeting moment
of a 9-year-old doing 9-year-old things. Still, it helps to have a token
signifying both order and origin—a nascent, wisping curl of a cirrus
cloud forecasting change on the horizon. A sense that, amid SGA’s
rise and rise and rise, the unique rhythms, mechanics, and style that
have made him an MVP-caliber superstar have always been there.
Even if they haven’t always been apparent.