Hamilton’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander leads his top-ranked Oklahoma City Thunder into Toronto to face the Raptors Thursday night.
Oklahoma City has won seven of its past 10 games to put it atop the NBA’s Western Conference.
Toronto is 12th in the East but has played its best stretch of basketball so far this season, winning three of its past four games.
RJ Barrett of Mississauga, Ont., was Gilgeous-Alexander’s teammate on Canada’s men’s Olympic basketball team.
Barrett has been on a roll for the Raptors during that hot streak.
Gilgeous-Alexander was the winner, last year, of the Northern Star Award for Canadian athlete of the year. He finished second in NBA MVP voting and led the Canadian men’s team to a World Cup bronze and its first Olympic berth in a generation.
Gilgeous-Alexander was third in scoring while leading the Thunder to the best record in the Western Conference. The 26-year-old guard was also the second-leading scorer in the Olympic men’s tournament.
Tim Francis, who coached Gilgeous-Alexander in 2012 and 2013 at Hamilton’s Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School, said there is a lot of “pride in having someone come out of the Hamilton ranks and to reach really the highest level of competition.”
Francis said Gilgeous-Alexander’s meteoric rise in Canadian basketball “shows for everyone in the city and in Ontario and in Canada what hard work can do.”