It’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s world and we’re all just living it.

The 27-year-old NBA superstar from Hamilton, Ontario, was named Sports Illustrated’s 2025 Sportsperson of the Year on Friday, joining some of the greatest athletes in history in the all-exclusive club. During the past calendar year, Gilgeous-Alexander won his first NBA MVP award and led the Oklahoma City Thunder to their first championship in franchise history, earning Finals MVP honors as well.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s start to the 2025-26 campaign has arguably been even more dominant. The Thunder are 29-5 through the first 34 games of this season after winning 24 of their first 25, and he ranks second in the NBA with 32.1 points per game. That’s despite the fact that he’s sat out the entire fourth quarter in 16 games already this season because of his team’s dominance.

Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

The Pantheon

As a result of his complete takeover of the sport this past year, Gilgeous-Alexander now enters a pantheon of names that include icons like Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali and Wayne Gretzky. Not to mention giants such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Billie Jean King. Or Joe Montana and Michael Jordan. And frankly, only a handful of winners had years that rival what SGA did in ‘25.

In terms of the great athletes we’ve seen in American sports over the decades, it’s hard to find a story quite like Gilgeous-Alexander’s. Largely considered an afterthought amongst the other top prospects in the 2018 draft, Gilgeous-Alexander was selected with the No. 11 overall pick by the Los Angeles Clippers.

After a season in Los Angeles, it became clear that Gilgeous-Alexander had legitimate star potential. It also just so happened that the Los Angeles Clippers were in the market for a superstar in Kawhi Leonard, who was just weeks removed from an improbable run to the 2019 NBA championship.

To bring Kawhi to Los Angeles, however, his management told the Clippers that acquiring Paul George from Oklahoma City was a must. When the Clippers finally pulled the trigger on the George trade, the initial reaction centered on the years’ worth of draft picks they gave up, rather than on the then-20-year-old point guard they included in the deal.

Dream Come True

For Thunder general manager Sam Presti, that 20-year-old was the true non-negotiable in the deal. By 2023, Gilgeous-Alexander had become an NBA All-Star, MVP candidate, and 30-point per game scorer. In 2025, he became unstoppable to the point that the haul of draft picks sent with him has been rendered basically moot before the team has even gotten through them all.

In the Sports Illustrated cover story written by NBA columnist Chris Mannix, Gilgeous-Alexander revealed that he still has to pinch himself sometimes when he looks at the reality of his career.

“Growing up you have goals and you write them down and you’re like, I’m going to get this one day,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “But way more people do that and don’t achieve their goals than actually achieve them. So it’s always like a is-this-really-my-life? type of feeling. And I don’t know if that’ll ever go away.”