Shai Gilgeous-Alexander contract explained: SGA eligible for $357M supermax but can make even more next year

What a year it’s been for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. His 68-win Oklahoma City Thunder are on the verge of hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the first time in OKC. He picked up his first regular-season MVP award, and he is in line to add a Finals MVP trophy to his collection as well. Rarely do individual and team accolades line up so cleanly. The last player to win both awards in a single season was LeBron James in 2013. Unsurprisingly, Gilgeous-Alexander is going to be rewarded for that.

Gilgeous-Alexander signed his initial rookie extension with the Thunder three offseasons ago in 2022. That makes him eligible for a contract extension in the summer of 2025. As luck would have it, his MVP award immediately makes him eligible for a supermax deal starting at 35% of the salary cap. It would kick in after the 2026-27 season, when his current deal is set to expire, and add over $293 million in new money across four additional seasons. In total, with his current deal factored in, that would tie him to the Thunder for six total years at almost $358 million. 

Here’s how that deal breaks down on a year-to-year basis with the assumption that the salary cap continues to rise by 10% annually as expected.

Potential SGA supermax (signed summer 2025)

Currently, Jayson Tatum holds the record for most guaranteed money in a contract after signing a $314 million supermax last summer. Obviously, the deal SGA can sign this summer is a substantial contract… but it isn’t even the most he can guarantee himself in the near future. NBA rules dictate that new contracts cannot last more than five years and extensions cannot tie a player to a team for more than six years in total. 

Fortunately, Gilgeous-Alexander’s MVP grants him three years worth of supermax eligibility. Therefore, he actually stands to guarantee himself even more money by waiting a year so he can add the maximum five seasons to his new deal. This arrangement would guarantee him around $380 million in new money and then the total value of the contract would be over $413 million with the final year of his current deal factored in.

Potential SGA supermax (signed summer 2026)

Obviously, waiting a year comes with some degree of risk, but it’s hard to imagine any injury scaring a team off of extending an MVP in his mid-20s. The reward here is historic. If Gilgeous-Alexander takes this contract, he will make more than $1 million per game in the 2031-32 season, and, on average, his extension would pay him around $76 million per year.

He is worth every penny, especially in an environment in which at least 10% annual cap growth is expected for the next several years, but given the state of his team, the possibility that he takes a bit less is also plausible. This season’s Thunder are the rare possible champion to have operated as a below-the-cap team during the preceding offseason, but that is going to change quickly.

This summer, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren will both be eligible for rookie extensions that would begin during the 2026-27 seasons. Those contracts would be capped at 25% of the cap in the first year unless either makes an All-NBA Team or wins Defensive Player of the Year or MVP next season. In that case, their max rises to 30%. Either way, both will be expensive, and the Thunder will have multiple new deals coming in the years that follow. A new Cason Wallace deal would start in the 2027-28 season, for example.

The Thunder have carefully planned their balance sheet for that uptick in expenses. Isaiah Hartenstein’s contract, for instance, is only guaranteed through next season. The idea would presumably be to move him before Holmgren and Williams get expensive. They have hoarded so many draft picks that they can theoretically keep cycling in cheap rookies as their existing supporting cast becomes too expensive to retain.

But the aprons are daunting. They’re already threatening last season’s champion, the Boston Celtics, and eventually, they will make life harder on the Thunder as well. But a year ago, Jalen Brunson left money on the table in an extension with the New York Knicks in an effort to ease the team-building burden his contract placed on them. It would not be terribly surprising to see Gilgeous-Alexander do the same. Perhaps Williams or Holmgren could as well, but as neither has received a market-value contract yet as Gilgeous-Alexander has, that’s a tad less likely.

Either way, Gilgeous-Alexander is going to be among the NBA’s highest-paid players in the near future. He might extend this summer. He might wait until next summer. But he is going to be richly rewarded for the season that he just had.