The modern pro athlete is subject to way too much scrutiny. They’re often the most unwilling influencers. And not in the Charles Barkley “I’m not a role model” way. More like, Kevin Durant is a billion-dollar business but has tuned so far into the Twitter reply guys he’s rendered obsessive and puny before the human project of knowing oneself during and despite criticism. In response to the deep sensitivities of anonymous troll attacks and bot barrages, we’ve produced a generation of perfectly trained, blasé, copy-paste cyborgs or whiny, shallow crybabies.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander manages to be both but in drone form. And I’m not just saying this because I'm a die-hard Knicks fan.
Groomed to attack the core need of referees — to be liked while governing — the NBA MVP is but a lens through which we see how ephemeral and crappy the rules are. They are the whims of the least confident powerful, not made from a consensus need for order. Not now. Not at the edge of imperial collapse.
They mean nothing. They mean less than nothing.
Standards and rules decide who gets precious, life-changing resources like respect and visibility, yet are only a reflection of the pettiest kings and bureaucrats. Shai’s restrained “fashion sense” is an example of his ultra boring, brand safe, monochromatic persona. He is a white label pro basketball avatar upon which to affix a logo of hope. He plays in the margins of the rules as a power grab even though his talent and hard work have already vaulted him to the top. Like Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, he’s learned the lesson of the insecure Millennial Class and muted himself into a Skimms deal, an official wireless partnership with AT&T and the kind of skin deep affiliations that make sports joyless, palatable, and flat.
On the respectability matrix, Shai is the 2026 center-line, somehow inoffensive and putrid to watch, flailing his arms and legs to perform the idea of contact, snaking his way into view of the authority figures to gain their approval and eventual favor. He is the Teacher’s Pet MVP, showing up to games with a sneering facsimile of much bigger assholes who paved the way. You could hate Kobe Bryant because he was a jerk. You could hate James Harden because he was so good he allowed himself not to care and failed at the highest level. Shai has become hateable by way of redundancy and plagiarism, cribbing the worst parts of both the ball hog archetype and the referee sycophant. He barely even complains to get what he wants, which would make him at least humanly annoying. He writhes and collapses. He trips himself like a silent film actor and gets up like it was all part of the show.
I do hate him but not like I hate people. I hate him like I hate the Carnival Claw Machine. I know it’s meant to trick me into believing I’ve got a chance at enjoyment. I despise that its very being is a poorly veiled illusion that children and fools will indulge as a symbol of promise. Of magic. Of luck. In reality, the machine pushes greed as the only divine spark worth feeling.
Shai is a regression into an NBA star-via-AI-prompt at the worst time for that. The league is beset by gambling and bad faith actors, crypto fantasies and indicted team officials. That his main appeal to the gatekeepers comes in subjective form — free throws that must be decided by fallible, impressionable, also-cornball refs — compounds the mistrust problem the NBA already has.
There’s a vocal movement to thwart the Oklahoma City Thunder for playing an unethical form of basketball. While I agree with that campaign’s root chakra energy, this plea goes further into the specifics of SGA and his blandness. We can’t let more cornballs win. The Celtics already took that mantle two years ago. Then the Pacers and Thunder clashed in a Corny Off for the ‘25 ring. I cannot suffer much more of this. Bring back cool NBA players. Bring back shot-for-shot with shit-talking overtime play. Bring back gall.
Whatever happens from here, leave corniness in the board room at the marketing huddle where it belongs.