OKLAHOMA CITY — It wasn’t a shock to see Shai Gilgeous-Alexander win his first Most Valuable Player award, and usually these things follow a script of sorts.
There were tears — referencing his wife.
There was the praise for his teammates, who sat with him on the stage as he talked about his road.
And there was also the bling, but that was a bit different. It wasn’t his own, but that of his teammates, who were sporting new Rolexes as a gift from Gilgeous-Alexander for winning the MVP trophy.
Usually you see this in other sports, when a running back reaches 2,000 yards or a quarterback wins MVP, they gift their offensive lineman something as a token of thanks. It happens in basketball, too, but this took a little more gumption from Gilgeous-Alexander.
The conversations began in earnest last season on the team bus, what he would do if he actually won the award.
“I don’t know what brought it up, but watches was in the conversation,” he said. “And a lot of guys on the team like watches, who doesn’t like watches. And then I said yes, which was also silly on my part, but I said yes.
“And then as I got closer to achieving the goal, I was like, ‘Wait a second. I actually have to do what I said I was going to do.’”
The MVP announcement was made an hour before the press conference, but clearly Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder had a feeling the two-man race would actually be quite definitive.
And it was.
Gilgeous-Alexander, Denver’s Nikola Jokić and Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo were the three finalists announced by the NBA, but most agreed the stiffest competition would come between the two Western Conference finalists — who happened to go head-to-head in the last round of the playoffs.
It was almost a clean reversal from last season in terms of how 1-2 laid out. Gilgeous-Alexander received 71 of the 100 first-place votes while Jokić received the other 29. Last year, Jokić earned 79 first-place votes while Gilgeous-Alexander took 15 of them.
The team success of the Thunder was as much a deciding factor as much as Gilgeous-Alexander’s individual play. The Thunder finished a whopping 18 games ahead of Denver in the standings, thus negating Jokić’s bid for a fourth MVP award — Jokić averaged 29.6 points, 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists to Gilgeous-Alexander’s 32.7 points (league leader), 6.4 assists and 5 rebounds.
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
It makes seven straight years a non-American has won the award, and Gilgeous-Alexander will be presented the Michael Jordan trophy before Game 2 of the Western Conference finals Thursday night at Paycom Center.
He’s been a premier player for years, but his profile has increased as the Thunder have improved after a couple of rocky years following his 2019 trade from the Los Angeles Clippers.
He finished fifth in 2022-23 voting, as it was clear the Thunder were coming. That was when he initially began believing he could play at an MVP level.
“I always thought that I could be a really good player, because I had seen what just putting your head down and working and controlling what you control can do for you,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I never thought this was going to happen. I dreamt about as a kid, but as a kid, it’s a fake dream.
“But as the days go on and you realize that, you get closer to your dream, it’s hard to not freak out. It’s hard to not be a six-year-old kid again, and I think that’s what’s allowed me to achieve it.”
He’s the third Thunder player to win the award, following in the lineage of Kevin Durant (2014) and Russell Westbrook (2017). Another drafted Thunder player, James Harden, won the award in 2018, although he’d been traded to the Houston Rockets before the start of the 2012-13 season.
The franchise in a small period has shown an ability to draft special players, and when they were trading Paul George to the Clippers following the 2018-19 season, the rookie Gilgeous-Alexander was a sticking point as much as the treasure trove of draft picks the Thunder also received.
So he and the Thunder franchise and players have grown together.
“We prioritize the right things, and we prioritize winning,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “We prioritize getting better. We prioritize each other’s success. … We’ve just focused on those things every day. Every day it’s becoming, how can we get better individually and as a group? Every day, it’s a learning process.”
He reverts to a karate book that helped him through his own personal ups and downs.
“The message in the book was basically that success isn’t linear, so it’s never just like this,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, putting his hands up and down to signify the roller coaster. “It’s always up and down, and you get three to go up four, and you dip again to go up six, and before you look at it, you’re up 10.”
That seems similar to how Oklahoma City has dominated its season, quietly taking down every team along the way, and on this day, both Gilgeous-Alexander and his teammates reaped some very shiny awards.
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