Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had a season for the ages in 2024-25, and capped it off with his 2nd CP Male Athlete of the Year award Saturday.
SGA won the NBA title, league MVP, Finals MVP, and scoring title last season for the Oklahoma City Thunder, taking home 89.3% of the votes to bring home top Canadian honours. Toronto Blue Jays 1st baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. took home 2nd place when all the ballots were tabulated.
“It’s not really even debatable as to whether he’s one of the best players in the world. I mean, there’s zero debate now,” said Rowan Barrett, the GM of Canada’s men’s senior national basketball team. “You could not like his game. You could not like his team. You could not like whatever but, objectively, how can you create an argument that he’s not one of the best players in the world?”
It’s the 2nd time in the last 3 years that Gilgeous-Alexander took home the award, as he becomes just the 17th male athlete all-time to earn 2 or more CP recognitions.
“He’s an amazing human being,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “We played a game in OKC (last year), and it was impressive to see him after his warm up on the court, there’s probably like 2,000 people waiting over there, and he spends anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes to sign all of the autographs that are asked of him.”
“You don’t see that every day, and not just what he does on the court, what he does off the court, what kind of person he is.”
Earlier this month, the 27 year old also took home the Lou Marsh Award, given out annually to Canada’s top athlete irrespective of gender. Prior to that, he took home best male athlete at the ESPY awards this past summer following his dominating on court performance over the last year.
“It’s a dream come true and for dreams to come true it takes a village,” Gilegeous-Alexander said, thanking his wife, parents, brother and others. “Those names probably don’t mean much but to me they mean everything.”
With a suddenly overflowing trophy cabinet, and the richest extension in NBA history signed, sealed and delivered, it would be easy for SGA to take his foot off the gas pedal. Instead, he and his Thunder teammates are once again atop the NBA standings at 26-5, while the point guard sits 2nd in league scoring at 32.1 points per game.
It’s been a meteoric rise to superstardom for the Hamilton, ON native who also debuted the Converse SHAI 001 this fall, marking the first signature shoe release of his career. SGA & OKC will look to get back into the win column on Sunday when they take on the Philadelphia 76ers in a 3:30pm ET showdown.
Photo: Sandro Halank. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.