Steve Nash on SGA, one MVP to another: ‘He's heading way past me'

Hamilton Spectator

22-05-2025

It's easy to forget how unbelievable it was when
Steve Nash won the NBA's most valuable player award
, and then won it again. A Canadian MVP? In the NBA? The path to that place didn't exist, and wasn't close to existing until it was fully formed. It was before the Canadian basketball generation arrived and even once it did Nash's MVP wins, and his Hall of Fame career, were one of one.
Twenty years after Nash's first MVP award, he has company. Oklahoma City Thunder guard
Shai Gilgeous Alexander
, Toronto-born and Hamilton-raised, was named
the 2025 NBA MVP
with 71 of 100 first-place votes.
'I mean, he's heading way past me. He's a historic player already,' Nash said. 'The fact that he won over
Nikola Jokic
, who's on his way to being one of the top — I don't know, he keeps going — one, two, three, four, five best players ever, shows you how amazing a season Shai had, and how galvanizing he is for his team and organization, and how he just continues to get better and better.'
Jokic has now won three MVPs and finished second twice in the past five years, and remains the game's defining player, but Gilgeous-Alexander was in some ways his equal, at the head of the league's defining team. The 68-win Thunder are three wins from the NBA Finals, are deep and defensively terrifying, and set a league record for winning margin this season at 12.9 points per game.
The Oklahoma Thunder superstar is the second Canadian to win the NBA MVP award, following Steve
'The amount of games we won, in the fashion that we won the games, is so impressive and is probably the main reason why I get the award,' Gilgeous-Alexander told TNT after the award was announced.
He led Oklahoma City with an NBA-leading 32.7 points, 5.0 rebounds, 6.4 assists, 1.7 steals, 1.0 blocks, .519/.375/.898 shooting, and just 2.4 turnovers per game. Among truly big-scoring guards, only
Steph Curry
has ever scored more efficiently; Gilgeous-Alexander scored the fifth-most points per 100 possessions in history on an absurd .637 true shooting percentage. Michael Jordan's best true shooting season was .614, in 1988-89; Luka Doncic once got to .617. Curry has hit .675, and Nash, who didn't shoot enough, once reached .654.
Gilgeous-Alexander bends like a reed, swerves like a sports car, slices like a blade, and stops on a dime. He is a master of acceptable amounts of contact, and he has a killer's heart. And he has obsessively, meticulously polished that mid-range game like a stone.
'I think we get carried away with athleticism being explosiveness, which he has, but it's more like stop, start, accel, decel, change of pace, direction, body control, and he's a master of finding contact,' Nash said. 'You add it all together with his length, and he's an incredible, incredible player.'
It's a two-man race for the NBA's MVP award. We asked Doug Smith to make the early case for both
Yes, Gilgeous-Alexander has some foul merchant grifting in him. But so does Jokic when he has to. The list of players who have won the regular and Finals MVP in the same season is breathtaking: Willis Reed, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan, LeBron James. Gilgeous-Alexander can join that list, and he hasn't even turned 27 years old. Nash was 31 when he won his first MVP.
This is a victory for Canadian basketball. Nash jumped from Canadian high school ball to the NCAA, which was rare at the time.
Gilgeous-Alexander didn't make his junior high school team
, and came off the bench for much of his one season at Kentucky. Like Nash, he was not seen as this kind of star.
But he is the culmination of what we hoped would follow Nash. Tristan Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett, and R.J. Barrett were top-five picks. Kelly Olynyk, Nik Stauskas, Trey Lyles and Jamal Murray were all late lottery picks in the years before Gilgeous-Alexander, picked No. 11 in 2018. (The
Raptors
offered DeMar DeRozan to the Clippers for the No. 12 and 13 picks that year, one of which was traded for Gilgeous-Alexander. The Clippers said no.)
'I think there's a reluctance, out of respect and admiration, to say names like Jordan and Kobe or whoever, but he does the same thing they do,' Nash said. 'If you look at the numbers and you break it down, there's a lot of things he does that are greater than everyone that's even close to those type of players. So he's ascending towards that category.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 20 of his 31 points in the second half, and
'And obviously, if you win the championship this year, that also helps the argument. But I'm not so much into arguments. I'm just into quality of play and quality of player, human being, leader, winner, and he's ascending at a historic rate here. So I mean, there's no limit, really. I just love him to death, and just to see him recognized is phenomenal.'
Canadian basketball has grown beyond its wildest dreams since the days of Nash, but this is the guy who will likely become the greatest basketball player we have ever produced. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, MVP.