Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year choice of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander stands out for on-court focus

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SI's choice of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander stands out amongst award selections

There are many different publications and organizations that pick a sports figure or figures of the year. While it's incredibly difficult to compare athletes across sports, those awards are often interesting for what they reveal on how the organization and its people think about sports. One of the most long-running and most-recognized awards is Sports Illustrated's Sportsperson of the Year, which started with the magazine's founding in 1954 (where they picked Roger Bannister for the sub-four-minute mile) and has been awarded every year since then. And their pick of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as the 2025 Sportsperson of the Year, announced Friday, stands out for spotlighting a dominant athlete who isn't particularly famous beyond the court.

That's not to say that Gilgeous-Alexander is obscure, of course. He's well-known in NBA circles, especially after averaging 32.7 points, 6.4 assists, and 5.0 rebounds per game in 2024-25 and winning both the regular-season and Finals MVP awards after leading the Oklahoma City Thunder to their first title in that city. And he has further followings from both Thunder fans and those in his native Canada, where he's been a key part of the national basketball team (especially in a bronze-medal run at the 2023 FIBA World Cup, which saw that team selected as team of the year by The Canadian Press).

But Gilgeous-Alexander plays in one of the NBA's smallest markets. And while markets don't always matter as much as some think, the athletes and other figures selected for year-end awards often come from the biggest-market teams and are prominent well beyond the field of play with quotes, activism, media or other corporate ventures; in essence, they're famous. While Gilgeous-Alexander has some level of fame (and does do some notable things off the court; the aforelinked SI cover story on his selection here, from Chris Mannix, covers his impressive charitable work in both Oklahoma City and Canada), this stands out as an unusual pick that's mostly about what happened on the court. And, from this corner, that deserves to be celebrated.

Of course, Sports Illustrated made perhaps the most notable example of a fame-influenced pick with this very award two years ago when they selected Deion Sanders after his first season coaching Colorado (a 4-8 finish). There are ways to defend that pick, with most of them revolving around the interest Sanders had brought to the school and the ways he'd vowed to change college football. And it might have been a prescient choice if Sanders actually did wind up making a seismic impact on the sport's top echelons, but his follow-up 9-4 and 3-9 seasons haven't shown that so far.

But the point here isn't particularly to debate Sanders and that 2023 pick. While that choice was slightly unusual by year-end award standards given Sanders' limited on-field accomplishments at that point, these awards from SI and other publications have often been heavily reliant on fame, and it fit into that tradition. Thus, it's notable to see a pick like Gilgeous-Alexander that really seems to go the other way from not just the 2023 Sanders award, but from these awards overall. And this also stands out in a sports media landscape that's been increasingly dominated by fame conversations rather than just what athletes are actually doing on the court or field.

Some other recent recipients of the SI award include Simone Biles (2024), Stephen Curry (2022), and Tom Brady (2021). All found notable athletic success in the year they were picked, but they're also all incredibly famous and searched-for, and tended to compete for big-market prominent teams. (Brady's win came for his time with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, of course, but he was so incredibly famous at that point that that team was a regular national discussion.) That's also been true with the Associated Press Athlete of the Year (Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers four of the last five years, Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees the other one, and A'ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark, Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Candace Parker on the women's side the past five years) and the TIME Athlete of the Year (Wilson, Clark, Lionel Messi, Judge, and Biles the past five years). LeBron James also won all three of those awards in 2020 (with a group of cross-sports athlete in the case of SI). None of those selections were necessarily bad, and all of those athletes posted remarkable on-field accomplishments, but they're all also (especially, but not exclusively, on the men's side) more frequent conversation topics for casual sports shows like First Take than Gilgeous-Alexander. This one seems more about sports than fame, and that's refreshing to see given how often we're seeing the reverse these days.