There is a version of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander that the league did not see coming. Not because he lacked talent, everyone who watched him at Kentucky in 2017-18 knew what was there, but because the path from 11th pick to back-to-back MVP, from a team that won 22 games to a championship franchise, required something that cannot be scouted or projected. It required a particular kind of patience combined with a particular kind of competitive intensity that only shows itself under pressure.
The formula is composite rank 33rd all time after eight seasons. It is about to move significantly higher.
What the Formula Sees
Regular season: +26.75 net wins Playoffs: +0.81 net wins Combined: +27.57 Seasons: 8 Avg/season: +3.34 Peak: +10.19 (2024-25, 68-14 Thunder) Top-3 avg: +8.70 Composite rank: 33rd
https://willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins/
The career average of +3.34 understates what SGA has become because it includes the two seasons on 22 and 24-win OKC teams where the formula recorded -2.70 and -3.33. Those numbers are not bad seasons. They are a player of growing excellence on teams that were deliberately losing. The formula normalizes against team context and on those rosters the context dragged everything down.
Strip those two seasons out and his six-season average from 2018-19 onward on teams that were competitive is +5.24. That number looks very different in the composite rankings.
The more important number is the trajectory. From -3.33 in 2021-22 to +10.19 in 2024-25 is a climb of 13.52 net wins over four seasons. In the 295-player database, that rate of improvement over that span is among the most dramatic ever recorded.
From Hamilton to the 11th Pick
He was born in Toronto and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. His mother Charmaine is a former Olympic track athlete, which explains the footwork and the first step that guards have spent years trying to solve and have not. He moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee for high school, one season at Kentucky, and then the 2018 draft where the Charlotte Hornets took him 11th and immediately traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers.
The Clippers season was a quiet revelation to people paying attention. He averaged 10.8 points per game as a rookie on a 48-win team, shot 47.6% from the field, and produced +1.62 net wins in a supporting role. Then the Thunder traded for him in July 2019 and the rebuilding process began.
What followed for two seasons was the NBA’s version of the minor leagues. OKC was not trying to win. Sam Presti was accumulating draft picks and assets. SGA was accumulating basketball. He was posting scoring totals that would have made him an All-Star on most teams, on franchises that were going 22-50 and 24-58, and the formula dutifully recorded negative net wins because the team context made it impossible to do otherwise.
The question those seasons answered was not whether he was good. It was whether he was the kind of player who keeps getting better when nobody is watching. The answer was yes.
The Climb
The season log tells the story as cleanly as anything in the database:
2018-19 (LAC, 48-34): +1.62 2019-20 (OKC, 44-28): +2.88 2020-21 (OKC, 22-50): -2.70 2021-22 (OKC, 24-58): -3.33 2022-23 (OKC, 40-42): +2.19 2023-24 (OKC, 57-25): +6.98 2024-25 (OKC, 68-14): +10.19 2025-26 (OKC, 64-18): +8.93
The two negative seasons in the middle are the tank years. Everything on either side of them is positive and rising. The jump from +2.19 in 2022-23 to +6.98 in 2023-24 to +10.19 in 2024-25 represents three consecutive seasons of improvement at an elite rate.
His 2024-25 season produced the scoring title, the MVP award, and the NBA championship. The formula recorded +10.19, placing that season in the same tier as the peak years of players who sit at the top of this entire database. He was 26 years old.
To put that peak in context, here is how it compares to the greatest guards in the database by single-season high:
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander: +10.19 (2024-25, 68-14 Thunder) Russell Westbrook: +9.27 (2012-13, 60-22 Thunder) Oscar Robertson: +7.83 (1970-71, 66-16 Bucks) Steve Nash: +6.77 (2004-05, 62-20 Suns) Isiah Thomas: +6.30 (1988-89, 63-19 Pistons)
SGA’s peak is not just the highest of this group. It is higher than Westbrook’s best by nearly a full net win, and higher than Robertson, Nash, and Thomas by a wide margin. The chart of all five careers shows the same thing visually: SGA’s peak season sits above every comparable guard in the database.
The Canada Detour Worth Mentioning
In 2023, Gilgeous-Alexander led Canada to a bronze medal at the FIBA Basketball World Cup, the first medal in the history of the Canadian men’s program. Canada had never won a medal at the World Cup. They did it with SGA as the clear best player on the roster, playing with the same relentlessness he brings to OKC games, in a tournament where most American-based stars find reasons not to participate.
He also represented Canada at the 2024 Paris Olympics in a run that ended against the United States. The willingness to show up for his country in international competition when he could easily have opted out is a detail about his character that the formula cannot measure but that the basketball community noticed.
The Holmgren Context
SGA and Wembanyama are playing each other right now in the Western Conference Finals. The article on Wembanyama covered the rivalry from Wemby’s side. From SGA’s side, the context is different.
Holmgren won a championship in OKC in 2025 alongside SGA. The two have co-existed on the same franchise through one of the most successful rebuilds in recent NBA history. The rivalry is not internal, it is the franchise versus Wembanyama and the Spurs, and SGA is the engine of that franchise.
When Wembanyama said in December 2025 that OKC played “isolation ball” and “forced basketball” without variety, SGA’s response was characteristically quiet. He did not say anything publicly. He produced +8.93 that season on a 64-win team. The formula said more than he needed to.
The Criticism Worth Addressing
No profile of SGA is complete without acknowledging the most persistent knock on his game: the accusations of flopping and manufacturing foul contact to get to the free throw line.
The criticism is not baseless. He leads the league in free throw attempts most seasons. He has an extraordinary ability to draw contact, some of it genuine and some of it, depending on your view, manufactured through off-ball movement and body positioning that exploits the rulebook rather than the defender. He has been called for flopping violations. Opposing coaches have complained about it publicly. Opposing fans have complained about it constantly.
The formula does not take a position on this. Free throws attempted are not in the formula at all. Missed free throws are counted as negative actions and made free throws generate points that go into the positive column, but the act of drawing fouls is not credited or penalized. What the formula sees is the output: the points, the rebounds, the assists, the steals, the efficiency.
What is worth saying plainly is that the line between elite contact creation and flopping is one that the NBA has never drawn clearly and that different players get called across it inconsistently. James Harden drew the same criticism for a decade. Dwyane Wade drew it. Every player whose offensive game is built around getting to the line eventually gets labeled.
Whether SGA crosses that line is a judgment call the formula cannot make. What it can say is that his efficiency numbers, the field goal percentages, the shooting splits, the turnover rates, are all consistent with a player who is genuinely elite rather than a player whose numbers are inflated by cheap trips to the line. +10.19 on a 68-win team is not a foul-drawing artifact. It is basketball production at a level that very few players in the history of the sport have reached.
The composite rank of 33rd will not hold. Eight seasons, two of them tank years, one playoff appearance in the database so far. As the career accumulates, and he is 27 years old with potentially a decade of basketball remaining, the formula will revise upward.
The comparison that makes the most analytical sense is Tony Parker, who currently sits eighth in this database at a career combined of +96.9. Parker played 18 seasons, averaged 5.60 net wins per season over his prime years, and won four championships alongside Duncan. SGA at his current trajectory, with the peak seasons he has already produced, is on a path that could exceed Parker’s career numbers.
The Durant and Westbrook franchise records he has broken in OKC are a useful benchmark. Durant’s best season in OKC produced a composite number comparable to SGA’s 2024-25. Westbrook’s best season produced less. SGA has already exceeded both of them at their OKC peaks, on better teams, with more efficient basketball.
He is from Hamilton, Ontario. His mother ran for Canada in the Olympics. He married his high school sweetheart. He gave the city of Hamilton the key to itself back, symbolically, by becoming its most famous export and staying connected to where he came from.
The formula sees a player in the middle of something. Eight seasons in, composite rank 33rd, peak of +10.19 at age 26. The numbers from the next ten years will determine where he eventually lands in the all-time rankings.
Based on the trajectory, the database should make room.
The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #8. He shot 43% from the free throw line and still produced one of the ten greatest individual seasons in the history of the sport. Subscribe to get it when it drops.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
