Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on His NBA Rivals, Fashion Secrets, and Why He Wants to Retire Young

Every weekday morning during the NBA offseason, a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade pulls into the driveway of an unremarkable brick building in an unremarkable office park in an unremarkable suburb of Toronto at 6 a.m. sharp. On this particular Thursday in early September, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hops out of the back seat looking fresh off the set of a Hype Williams video: cropped tactical vest, billowing Balenciaga track pants, backwards cap over a taut durag, all the same inky shade of black. The Oklahoma City Thunder star glides inside, trousers swishing as he walks, past a vacant reception desk and down an unlit hallway until he emerges into the fluorescent-lit expanse of the gym. Inside, there are three full-size basketball courts and a couple stands of bleachers. Along the back wall is an enormous mural of an NBA-ified Mount Rushmore: Jordan, LeBron, Kareem, Kobe.

Immediately as he plops into a chair on the sidelines and changes into his workout clothes, SGA is at ease, loose, laughing. As he should be: He has known virtually everyone in the room this morning for much of his life. His skills coach, Nate Mitchell, with whom he’s worked every summer since he was 16. His sixth-grade pals, Maurice Montoya and Mark Castillanes, who now help out on the court during drills. The only two relative newcomers present are Kayode Fakomi—a six-foot-seven former college player brought aboard Team SGA this summer to simulate NBA-size defenders—and me.

Shai is ready to go now. He’s laced up his space-age signature Converses with orange Thunder shorts, white compression tights, and a fitted vintage tee bearing the logo of the Mohawk Mountaineers, a college team from his nearby hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. He begins slowly, methodically. Spot shooting from the elbows, then the free throw line. Catch-and-shoots from beyond the arc. Kickout passes to the perimeter. Floaters in the key. Driving the lane from all directions, SGA bobbing and weaving like Mayweather on the ropes, impossibly fluid and in control despite operating at angles that would cause regular human beings to fall flat on their asses. He repeats these movements over and over and over, like a mantra, gracefully increasing his pace and intensity until he reaches full blistering game speed.

“He looks like he’s on a motorbike,” the NBA podcaster J.E. Skeets—government name Phil Elder—tells me of Shai’s countersteering move set. “It should be herky-jerky, but he’s as smooth as anybody in the league.”

All NBA players work out in their summers to some degree, but few have ever maximized their downtime in as ruthlessly hyper-efficient a manner as Gilgeous-Alexander. Since being drafted 11th overall in 2018 and finishing a distant sixth in Rookie of the Year voting the following June, the 27-year-old has returned from every break radically better. His entire life, from his home base in small-town Ontario to his tight circle of day ones, has been constructed to make sticking to the routine that’s gotten him here seamless. That superhuman will for self-improvement just led SGA to complete one of the greatest individual seasons in league history, becoming only the fourth player ever—after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, and Shaquille O’Neal—to win the regular-season MVP, Finals MVP, scoring title, and NBA championship all in the same year.

“I don’t know who was looking at him as a teenager and saying they saw this,” says Rowan Barrett, the Canada Basketball general manager who has tracked Gilgeous-Alexander’s career since he was 15. “He’s super talented, everyone can see that. But it’s the work that really matters—his number one talent is his discipline and focus.”

With most of his lifelong basketball goals crossed off well ahead of schedule, Gilgeous-Alexander is steering his relentless drive toward even greater ambitions. For example, after lifting that first Larry O’Brien trophy in June, SGA is eager to establish his absurdly young Thunder squad as a genuine dynasty. Beyond that, there’s the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics on the horizon, a chance for him to help Canada nab its first medal in basketball since 1936. And, of course, ultimately, he’s trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he belongs up on that Mount Rushmore mural in the gym alongside the all-time greats.

“I pick up a basketball to be the best. If you’re asking me if I want to be better than Kobe, of course I do,” Shai says. “Whether I get there or not, we’ll find out.”

Off court, the ambition is equally singular: Already considered the league’s best-dressed player, he’s looking to nurture his upstart Converse line into an Air Jordan–esque global concern. And he’s one of the few players who could authentically carry the style mantle for years to come. Most importantly, since he and his wife, Hailey, welcomed their son, Ares, last year, he’s learning to balance that hunger for greatness with the responsibilities that come with being an active and present father.

“Family, friends, hoops, fashion” is how he ticks off the priorities. “Everything else just gets in the way.”

SGA lives in a Gilmore Girls–y town just outside Hamilton, on a quiet, leafy street along the banks of Lake Ontario. When I roll up to his place at half past noon, he’s in the driveway finishing his second workout of the day: 90 minutes with his strength trainer, Nem Ilic, who’s currently making him Sisyphus a weighted sled back and forth past his matching black G-Wagon and Range Rover. “Couple more sets and I’ll be right there,” he says, ushering me through the immaculate gym in the garage and into the house.

Inside, it smells delicious; SGA’s private chef is grilling meat and boiling pasta for lunch. The family dog, a floppy-eared Doberman named Echo, rises from a vast white couch in the living room and pads over to me for some head scratches. Propped against a wall, next to Ares’s toddler-size electric car, is a street sign for “Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Way”—given to him, along with the key to the city, by Hamilton’s mayor in August. The space is airy, comfortable, charmingly domestic. It feels less like the opulently curated homes in Architectural Digest and more like visiting your richest friend’s house in high school.

That was by design, Gilgeous-Alexander explains, as we settle in at his dining table to talk. He’s shirtless and wearing another pair of Thunder shorts, blue this time, his post-lift torso wiry and chiseled like a muscle-bound Gumby. “I like smaller cities,” he responds, between sips of a protein shake, when I ask why a stylish young superstar who just signed a four-year, $285 million contract extension isn’t living in Miami or LA or even just half an hour up the road in Toronto. Growing up in working-class Hamilton—the Newark to Toronto’s New York, as the writer Eric Koreen once put it—and playing in Oklahoma City has primed him for a quieter way of life. “I can walk around here freely. It’s mostly older people walking the dog. I was just in the NBA season for 10 months, and we were all over the place—fans 24/7, on a flight, off a flight. In my offseason, I want the absolute opposite, so I just hide out here.”

If your only experience of SGA is watching him coolly pick apart defenses at will or swagger into arenas in galaxy-brain fits, then a face-to-face conversation with him can feel disorienting. He’s quick to smile and laugh. His deep, bassy voice is gentler and warmer than it sounds in postgame pressers. “He’s coming in the building with a fur coat and sunglasses on,” Barrett tells me, “but he doesn’t get carried away with all that. He’s very down to earth.”

To that end, Shai’s larger-than-life style might seem counterintuitive for someone so low-key and private, who proudly cops to rarely, if ever, going out. But it’s undeniable: The dude just loves clothes. On a quiet night, he tells me, if his son is asleep and his wife is out with the girls, he’ll head down to his walk-in closet in the basement and try on combination after combination for hours. “I’ll bring a snack, I’ll bring a drink,” he says, “and sometimes I’ll come up with something fire. I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I’m going to wear this once a week during the season.’ And then, before you know it, that silhouette is a trend.”

In easily the NBA’s most fashion-obsessed era ever, where pregame tunnel fits are often scrutinized as rigorously as the games themselves, Gilgeous-Alexander has firmly established himself as the league’s leading taste god. He doesn’t have a stylist, relying solely on his own acutely honed instincts to combine textures and palettes and forms with freaky finesse. The way his voluminous jeans slouch below his waistline, the way his shrunken shirts exaggerate his willowy physique, the way he piles layers of buttery leather—all of it has outsized ripple effects on the culture at large, directly influencing how legions of kids on TikTok and the very players he suits up against every night will dress in the months to come. “A lot of guys want to wear his style,” admits Dillon Brooks, the Phoenix Suns agitator and SGA’s Team Canada running mate. “The big belt buckles, the loose pants, the nice jackets that bring it all together.”

Ninety percent of his wardrobe now, Shai estimates, is either custom or vintage. “Rarity and personality are the biggest things I look for in clothes,” he explains. He often orders bespoke pieces from the revered LA label Chrome Hearts, which he respects for prioritizing both quality and unattainability. But he also designs a lot of one-off ensembles for himself, which he dreams up on the fly and has fashioned by a secret cabal of tailors and factories. For instance: When his Converse sneakers dropped recently in a soft pastel yellow, he wanted something “complementary but not too matchy” for launch day. “So I made gold, three-quarter flare, faux-alligator shorts—and a headband to match.”

The vintage stuff, though, that’s where Shai lets his true menswear sicko come out to play. “You can find a pair of pants with a sun fade from 40 years ago that you just can’t re-create in the factory,” he rhapsodizes, “and they fit a certain way, and they have a lining on the inside that they don’t make anymore.” He seeks out vintage stores in almost every city he plays in, oftentimes bringing his Thunder bestie Jalen Williams along for the ride.

When I ask him to explain his process for evaluating a vintage T-shirt, he takes a deep breath, breaks into the widest grin I’ll see all day, and then breathlessly delivers a TED Talk on the ins and outs of color (“There’s a difference between grays and faded blacks…”), shape (“I usually prefer regular length with a slimmer fit and shorter sleeves, but sometimes I’ll go for wider and boxier with more of a crop lengthwise…”), and usage (“Depending on how high-waisted the pant is, whatever the fit is asking for, I have an option…”).

Obviously, a person with that level of savant-like intuition seems destined to someday build a fashion empire. Gilgeous-Alexander says he’s long harbored those dreams himself—he scribbles ideas down when he has them, saves screenshots from Vogue Runway to reference down the road—but won’t commit to them fully until he’s done with basketball. “The more I understand fashion and the actual work behind it, it kind of draws me back from starting a brand right now,” he says. “But I might get to it one day. Maybe. We’ll see.”

In the meantime, he’s pouring all that obsession into his new Converse signature line. A lot of NBA players claim to have creative input on their sneakers, but Shai has his original sketches of the Shai 001 to prove it. “It’s his baby,” says Thomasi Gilgeous-Alexander, Shai’s younger brother, who serves as a design consultant with Converse. “The amount of hours and edits that have gone into it—it just makes us so proud when we hold the shoe.”

The aim was to create the rare modern performance shoe people would actually want to wear casually. Current signature models like Devin Booker’s retro-tinged Nike Book 1 or Anthony Edwards’s futuristic Adidas AE1 are hits on the court, but you’d be hard-pressed to spot anyone lacing them up with jeans on the weekend, as they would a pair of Jordans. “When we were teenagers, people were lining up for Kobes and LeBrons,” Thomasi says. “That’s kind of died now.” Their solution, Thomasi continues, was to go “completely away from the norm of basketball shoes right now,” eschewing the sleeker silhouettes that have dominated the last decade or so in favor of a puffier, Y2K-inflected exterior, with a prominent zip closure meant to be worn done up on the hardwood and left open off it. It feels especially noteworthy that Shai chose to sign with Converse, rather than its parent company, Nike. Converse popularized the basketball shoe in the late 1910s with the All Star, the iconic model that would go on to account for roughly 70 to 80 percent of the hoops footwear market by the ’60s. But the legendary sneaker brand hasn’t produced genuine buzz in the performance space in ages. “It was about which company wanted to get behind him and not necessarily just bring him along,” Thomasi says.

The bet seems to have paid off enormously for both sides: Thanks in large part to Gilgeous-Alexander’s dressing and performing in them at an MVP-caliber clip before, during, and after all 23 games of the Thunder’s marathon playoff run to the championship last season, the Shai 001’s first release in September sold out in minutes. Shai, naturally, has already begun thinking about the sequels. “The next one has to be better than the last to keep the momentum going,” he says. “I’ll try to elevate what I just did and try to make it even crazier.”

While all the fashion stuff comes naturally to him, Shai sees dominating in that arena as just one vital piece of an ambitious legacy-building puzzle. “Being the best dressed and being the best player of the night, it’s hand in hand for me,” he says. “It comes with the territory.”

From Wilt Chamberlain’s funkadelic bell bottoms to Jordan’s drapey tailoring to Allen Iverson’s supersized streetwear to LeBron’s high-fashion flexes, there’s a distinguished history of NBA alphas setting the tone for the league sartorially. And after the season he’s just had, Gilgeous-Alexander has every right to consider himself part of that lineage.

Ask anyone close to Shai about him and the first thing they’ll mention is his Energizer Bunny work ethic. Even his cousin Nickeil Alexander-Walker, the Atlanta Hawks swingman who followed a near-identical path to the NBA—born just seven weeks apart, the pair were trained tirelessly by Shai’s dad growing up and roomed together during prep school in Tennessee as teens—admits he can’t always keep up in that department.

“Rain, sunshine, snow, hail, he just puts in the work,” Nickeil tells me. “There’s days where I’m like, ‘Y’all, I don’t got it today,’ but Shai, he’s had it.”

It’s what’s allowed him to outpace expectations at every turn. First at Kentucky, where he entered the storied program as the sixth-ranked of the team’s eight freshman recruits and left as the MVP of the SEC Tournament. Then again in the NBA, where after being drafted just 11th and playing one season with the Clippers, he was shipped out to the rebuilding Thunder as part of a deal for established All-Star Paul George. Six years on, no one would deny OKC won that trade handily.

“The trend with Shai is that he always knew before any of us,” says Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault. “He has always had a very clear vision for himself of not only where he wants to go, but what he needs to do next.”

In June, minutes after the buzzer sounded in Game 7 of the NBA Finals and the Thunder walked away champions over the scrappy Indiana Pacers, Nate Mitchell found Shai on the court amid all the chaos and confetti. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Yo, I have to get so much better,’ ” Mitchell recalls, grinning. “That was before I could even say congrats.”

And so: At just 27 years old, having barely entered his prime, just how much better at basketball can Shai actually get? How much can he improve upon the near-perfect campaign he just authored, delivering a career high 32.7 points per game to lead the Thunder to 68 regular-season wins, an all-time NBA record for scoring differential, and Oklahoma City’s first-ever championship? How much more clinical and efficient can his game become, when he already glides to his spots, undresses hapless defenders, and sinks silky midrange jumpers with the casual ease of Neo picking bullets out of midair in The Matrix?

Shai’s unflappable, untouchable demeanor makes it difficult for the haters lurking on NBA Twitter and Reddit to latch onto anything concrete. Even opposing players can’t find a way to get under his skin. “Guys don’t really talk shit to me,” he says. “I don’t do nothing that warrants talking shit. I go out there, I have 30, we win, I go home. I’m not out there doing crazy stuff.”

Nothing seems to phase him. The closest thing he’s ever had to an on-court confrontation—a heated scuffle over the ball with Dillon Brooks during a game against the Houston Rockets last December—ended with both players affably laughing it off in the moment. “Shai’s the scariest type of person to play against,” says Thunder center Chet Holmgren, “because no matter what you do or say, you can’t even get a reaction out of the guy. He just goes out there and kills.”

At one point, I ask Shai which of the other young stars in the league he considers to be his closest rivals. Maybe Tyrese Haliburton, the Pacers guard he battled for seven grueling games in the Finals last season? He shrugs. “Nothing against the guys my age,” Shai says, “but the guys I can’t wait to match up against are the LeBrons, the Steph Currys, the KDs, the James Hardens. The guys I grew up watching, that have completely stamped themselves on basketball forever, that have accomplished the things I want from the game. There’s no better test to see if I’m capable of accomplishing those things than going against those guys.”

What about Nikola Jokić, the Denver Nuggets virtuoso with whom he’s been locked in a two-horse race for MVP the last couple of seasons? “He’s a center and I’m a point guard, so it’s hard to match up,” he says, shrugging again. “Like back in the day, when Chris Paul and Dwight Howard were in their prime—they can compete, but they can’t match up, so it’s hard to tell [who’s better], right?”

From an outside perspective, there seems to be only two on-court tests currently in Shai’s crosshairs. The first is whether he and the Thunder’s youthful core can become the first team to win back-to-back championships since the Golden State Warriors in 2018—and how many more titles they can string together beyond that. “That’s what it’s all about: In your era, how dominant can you be?” he says. “And winning multiple in a row speaks to that dominance, for sure. We definitely have the talent, the personnel, the chemistry, the experience to repeat. But so many things have to go right from now to the end of June 2026.”

The second is arguably an even more Herculean task: leading Canada’s golden generation of hoopers to an Olympic podium for the first time since the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin—and ideally unseating the long-dominant Team USA in the process. It would make him a Canadian immortal.

“He’s going to be an inspiring figure for many generations of Canadians to come,” says Steve Nash, the two-time NBA MVP and former Team Canada captain. “I have no problem anointing him the greatest Canadian player ever.”

Later that night, after I’d left Shai so he could spend some quality time with Ares, I head back to his house for one final chat. He’s wearing a svelte Ralph Lauren ringer tee and satiny cargo pants. His hair, normally set back in tight, immaculate braids, has been let loose in a curly mass, and his preferred hairstylist is over for a last-minute braiding session. Shai and I sit facing one another at the colossal marble-topped island in his kitchen as she gets to work on his hair behind him. In addition to the 6 a.m. and 11 a.m. workout sessions, Shai used to regularly go back to the gym for an evening shootaround. Now that’s only on occasion, because he’s found, as he’s gotten older, that “it’s less about the amount of reps and more the quality of reps,” and that getting real rest is more beneficial.

Given Shai’s preference for privacy, it feels notable that he has made a conscious effort to be more public facing in the wake of winning a ring and becoming MVP. He’s on the cover of NBA 2K26, appeared in a new YSL Beauty campaign, and stars in the second season of Netflix’s Starting 5 docuseries. To promote his shoes, he went on The Tonight Show, where he dressed Jimmy Fallon up in one of his brashest tunnel fits, and linked up with fellow Canadian legend Nardwuar for a typically raucous interview.

(Shai’s most notable moment of the offseason, in fact, may have been when, in July, his close pal Drake popped up onstage appearing to sport a tattoo of SGA’s Thunder jersey on his arm…covering the very spot where he previously had a LeBron tattoo. “I understand why it might seem crazy that Drake tattooed me on his arm,” Shai tells me. “But to me, that’s just the homie.” Was there any symbolism on Drake’s part, I ask, regarding who he’d covered up? “Yeah, I don’t know about all that,” he replies. “I don’t ask questions.”)

Still, he has his limits. “I won’t be doing no podcast,” Shai says, when I ask if he’ll ever join the growing brigade of current and former players who have gone behind the mic. “I can’t stand a podcast.”

The on-court domination combined with these offseason moves feel designed to help position Shai as a leading candidate to become the next face of the NBA—a somewhat nebulous title that, as SGA himself rightly points out, isn’t something you can just claim. “You really can’t control who the face of the league is,” he says. “The world has to decide it. There are billions of people who watch basketball, and they just have to gravitate towards you in that way.” Being a great player, he says, isn’t always enough: “Tim Duncan was arguably the greatest power forward ever, insanely accomplished, and he was never the quote-unquote face of the league.” But if any star of the current generation seems poised to take the crown, it’s the guy whom even Giannis Antetokounmpo once famously asked to borrow “a little bit of aura” from.

Some reigning faces of the NBA, guys like LeBron and Shai’s longtime mentor, Chris Paul, are still going strong in their 40s.

Is that how long you plan on playing, too?

“I definitely think I can,” Shai replies. And then, without hesitating, he adds, “I won’t, though. A hundred percent.”

Wait, really?

“I won’t want to miss that much of my kid’s life,” he explains. “I won’t want to be away and miss his first basketball game every year, his first soccer game, football game, piano lesson, chess lesson, whatever it is,” he says. “And there’s a certain point in your career where you reach your peak. I don’t fault guys for still playing. They love the game. But I just feel like I play this game, ultimately, to see what the best version of me can be. Once I figure that out and I start going down, then it’s like, Okay, well, what am I playing for now? As soon as that happens, I’ll be on the first ship out.”

So you think it’ll be, like, what—your mid-30s?

“There’s no telling,” he says. “But I promise you it won’t be 40.”

When I tell Shai’s mom, Charmaine Gilgeous, about her son’s retirement musings, she shakes her head and laughs. “That’s easy to say when you’re 27 years old, and you just achieved every single one of your goals in the same calendar year,” she says. “At his age, 40 seems so old. But he’s not thinking about the fact that when he’s 40, Ares will still be a kid.”

Charmaine, a former Olympic sprinter for Antigua and Barbuda, raised Shai and Thomasi to value diligence, humility, and loyalty. “When I show off about my kids now, I don’t even talk about basketball,” she tells me, eyes wet. “I’ve raised model male citizens. Literally everything I tried to instill in them actually stuck.”

In other words: SGA might dress like Dennis Rodman and play like Kobe Bryant, but he carries himself like…well, like Charmaine’s son.

“No matter what happens, I know that basketball is not the most important thing to me,” Shai emphasizes when I ask what his family has meant to his career. “It takes the pressure off of the game knowing that I have something else that means more, that I hold dear to my heart. It’s been the reason why I’m so at peace.”

Yang-Yi Goh is GQ’s senior style editor.

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of GQ with the title “The NBA Enters Its SGA Era”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Matthew Hen
Barbering by Moe Harb
Braiding by Kianna Bona
Grooming by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Tailoring by Jenna Gandy
Set design by James Reiger
Produced by Studio Lou
Special thanks to Mercedes-Benz