Last June, with the confetti still being swept off the Paycom Center floor, a blue-clad crowd gathered inside the Broadway 10 Bar & Chophouse to celebrate Oklahoma City’s NBA championship. Surrounded by friends and family (and a healthy number of their friends and their families), Thunder players, coaches and staffers partied deep into the night. Guests picked at buffet tables lined with steak medallions and crab cakes. Against a wall, the Larry O’Brien trophy rested as a prop for pictures. Champagne that went largely untouched in Oklahoma City’s locker room—what do you expect from a title winner led by a bunch of early-20-somethings who needed help figuring out how to pop the cork?—flowed liberally into glass flutes. A few freshly shotgunned beer cans littered the floor. In the middle of it all was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s MVP, scoring champion and Finals MVP, the fourth player ever to complete that trifecta in one season. In between hugs and high fives, Gilgeous-Alexander was overheard offering a promise: I can be so much better.
“Well,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, “I can be.” It’s mid-November and he is in the backseat of a black SUV speeding down an empty Oklahoma City highway. The suggestion that it seemed strange to be thinking about improving after one of the greatest single seasons in sports history draws a shrug. “I think more than anything I was excited by the fact that I had achieved those things and still had so much room to grow,” he says. As a teenager, Gilgeous-Alexander jotted down goals in a notebook. Division I scholarship. NBA player. Lottery pick. Over time the goals got more ambitious. All-Star. MVP. NBA champion. “There’s an obsessiveness to him,” says Nate Mitchell, who has been training Gilgeous-Alexander since he was 16.
