We are gathered here today to pay tribute to the 2026 NBA Most Valuable Player race. It was laid to rest, rather emphatically, by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on Monday night, in one of the most brilliant performances of the entire season, with two of the most memorable shots of his career.
First, the performance: 35 points, 15 assists, nine rebounds, and zero turnovers in the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 129-126 win over the Denver Nuggets. SGA entered the night needing just 20 points to tie Wilt Chamberlain for the all-time record of 126 consecutive 20-point games. He got it, obviously, and he did it in both typical and atypical fashion. When he wasn’t carving up the Nuggets defense with his usual smorgasbord of drives and contested midrange jumpers, SGA picked Denver apart with the pass, setting a career high in assists on a night when three of OKC’s best players weren’t in the lineup.
And then, the shots themselves. In a high-intensity, playoff-like clash against his biggest adversary, SGA more than met the moment yet again. Up one with 15 seconds to go, Gilgeous-Alexander hit one of the most absurd stepback 3s I can recall, covering the same ground in one giant step that James Harden covers in, like, four.
It was the kind of shot you can build an MVP case on: a game-sealing dagger against the best player in the world. As he walked back to the bench after a Denver timeout, Shai dismissed Christian Braun with a pshhh and then threw up the deuces—to bid farewell to the Nuggets, to Nikola Jokic, to the MVP debate and the consternation over the 65-game rule. That might have been his only mistake of the night, considering that on the next possession, a costly Jaylin Williams foul gave the Nuggets a four-point play that ended up tying the game.
So with six seconds and the score even at 126, SGA found himself again with the ball out near half court. This time, he drove hard to his right, with Spencer Jones attached to his left hip and Braun waiting in the paint. This time, he stepped back the other way, launching a triple from the wing over Jones’s outstretched hand. Of course it went in.
“I’m glad he’s on our team,” Williams said after the game, “because he just saved my ass.”
It’s a fun quip that gets at a larger truth.
Just as the game seemed to slip from the Thunder’s grasp, Shai snatched it back like one of his uncanny stepback jumpers. Just as the MVP race seemed opened up, he closed it. As NBA fans piled on the Thunder for being boring and on Shai for drawing contact, he delivered one of the most electric performances of the season with just four free throws. And mere days after Jayson Tatum’s return from injury seemed to rewrite the NBA’s title picture, SGA submitted a reminder of who’s on top.
With a cold-blooded nonchalance, Gilgeous-Alexander has a way of giving his team exactly what it needs. For years, he has spurred OKC’s unprecedented rise, and this season, he has kept it at the top of the West despite a battering of injuries. With much of its rotation on the inactive list, OKC stumbled through a relatively pedestrian January and February, dropping five of eight at one point. SGA himself missed three weeks with an abdominal strain, throwing his MVP qualification into question as his team’s lead in the West shrank to 2.5 games and the league’s other contenders circled. But Gilgeous-Alexander is delivering OKC from that, too. The Thunder haven’t lost in the six games since his return, and in just two possessions on Monday night, he seemed to wrest back control of the entire season.
At just 27 years old, Gilgeous-Alexander is on a fast track to rarefied air. He’s the odds-on favorite to win the MVP award, his second straight. He’s sharing headlines with Chamberlain, which tends to be a pretty good sign. And according to Keerthika Uthayakumar, SGA is on pace to become the first player since Michael Jordan in 1993 to average 30 points per game in four straight seasons.
He’s also still improving. Turning the stepback 3 into a consistent part of his offensive repertoire has made Shai truly unguardable in isolation—and for that matter, in help situations, too. Watching him slip loose from defenders is like watching Randall disappear in Monsters, Inc. There’s simply no way to defend someone who moves like he does and can hit tough shots from anywhere on the floor. And now, when opponents sell out to crowd him, as the Nuggets did on Monday night, Shai is better than ever at making the proper reads and delivering the right passes to his teammates.
In that sense, SGA is the head of a very long snake. Last night, in his first game back since late January, Ajay Mitchell poured in 24 points. Pressed into the starting lineup against Denver’s massive front line, Williams had a blistering 29 and 12. OKC’s newest acquisition, Jared McCain, pitched in a clutch 13 points and was a team-high plus-19 in 21 minutes. Their shorthanded win over the Nuggets underscored that the Thunder are built to withstand the loss of just about anyone—from Chet Holmgren to Jalen Williams to Alex Caruso. SGA is the lone exception.
No one else on the Thunder, or in the entire league, can generate the kind of offense that Shai can. It’s what allows the Thunder to lean so heavily into defense throughout the rest of the roster. It’s what allows players like Cason Wallace and Aaron Wiggins to slot so neatly into their roles. And it’s what allows an undermanned and undersized OKC team to go toe-to-toe with Jokic, who had a dazzling 32, 14, and 13, and come out on top. The Thunder’s machinelike system remains the most bankable formula in the NBA, but it’s all predicated on Shai’s ability to make shots like the ones he hit on Monday night.
We already knew this. But amid a strange season, it sometimes takes a special moment to remind us. Shai’s back-to-back daggers against the Nuggets might end up being his answer to Steph Curry’s double bang. Both took place in the same arena, for one. Both capped a frantic final stretch in one of the best regular-season games of their respective seasons. And like Curry’s shot did in 2016, Shai’s literal double bang seems like it could deliver him an MVP award and become one of the most enduring moments of his career.
