A formerly “puny” man could not find anyone tall enough to guard him.

A few years into his professional career, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander needed to add post-up drills to his summer routine. His trainers, far from the typical troop that surrounds an NBA superstar, couldn’t meet the criteria. Gilgeous-Alexander spends his summers in Hamilton, Ontario, near where he grew up. His morning workouts, which begin at 6 a.m., include a Team Canada assistant coach and six friends from high school.

The gang goes by the name of its text chat: “Sunrise Training.” But no regular sunrise trainer is bigger than 6 foot 2. Whatever the crew wanted to try with Gilgeous-Alexander on the low block, it couldn’t come close to replicating the MVP candidate’s NBA counterparts. They were determined to solve the problem.

The gymnasium where he and the sunrise trainers work contains three courts: one he and his friends were using that day, another empty one and one more where a 6-8 stranger, Stefan Borovac, was shooting around. Both he and Gilgeous-Alexander’s group finished around the same time. As Borovac headed to the door, passing the sunrise trainers on the way, Nate Mitchell, Gilgeous-Alexander’s summer coach and a coach with Team Canada for nearly a decade, wandered to this power-forward-sized figure.

“Can I grab you for a second?” Mitchell asked.

The sunrise trainers were about to acquire a new member.

Gilgeous-Alexander, with his unconventional training crew, has become an unconventional megastar. He is the best player on the 50-11 Oklahoma City Thunder, who are running away with the Western Conference’s top seed. He’s tracking to win his first scoring title, averaging 32.6 points and most recently dropping 51 Monday against the Houston Rockets, his fourth 50-point performance over the past seven weeks. With only a quarter of the season remaining, Las Vegas has him as the odds-on favorite to win his first MVP.

The 6-6 guard moves as if he’s beholden to directions on Waze. Sure, he arrives at expected destinations — in the post, from his cushy midrange or (now more than ever) while pulling up from 3-point land — but in his journey there, he will weave onto a dirt path no one else knew existed. He halts just when it seems he’s about to speed up, jolts when a defender succumbs to one of his dekes. That skill has taken him to the forefront of the MVP conversation.

His pacing is unlike anyone else’s. But then again, so is his preparation. And on that morning, before Gilgeous-Alexander had reached even All-Star status, he needed someone to match his skill — or, at least, his size and quirks.

Mitchell pointed to Canada’s greatest active player and explained the situation to Borovac, a former D-I baller at UMass-Lowell who grew up not far away from Gilgeous-Alexander. Mitchell saw Borovac sinking jumpers and dunking, an acceptable test of his athleticism. He asked if Borovac would join the next morning to guard the All-Star in post-up drills.

“I’d be happy to,” Borovac responded.

He returned the next day and fared well. Gilgeous-Alexander scored more often than not, but Borovac was competitive, enough so that the sunrise trainers invited him back the following morning. And the next one. And the next one. And the summer after that. And the subsequent summer, too.

Years later, Borovac remains a member of the team, the guy with a daily summertime task that might make Sisyphus quit. The sunrise trainers use more than just one player to guard Gilgeous-Alexander. His offseason strategy is to face live defenses with moving parts, a situation more replicable to the ones he sees in NBA action, instead of repeating the same drills on a loop. But when it comes to post-ups, Borovac is the brawn in Gilgeous-Alexander’s grill.

“Stef has the hardest job in the world,” Mitchell said.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s usual routine begins at 6 a.m., but this is a public gym, where camps enter some days only an hour later. On those mornings, the sunrise trainers arrive at 5 a.m., just so Gilgeous-Alexander can get his usual routine in before heading to strength training later and then returning to the gym in the afternoon for more shooting.

This is Gilgeous-Alexander’s life — and it has been for a while. Starting in eighth grade, he would arrive at his school’s gym at 6 a.m. daily to get shots up 2 1/2 hours before classes started.

A unique approach has taken him to the pinnacle of basketball. Most high school recruit rankings plopped him somewhere in the 30s before he headed to Kentucky in 2017. He wasn’t drafted until the end of the lottery the next year. The LA Clippers dealt him to the Thunder as part of the Paul George trade after only one pro season, when he showed promise, but when no one predicted he would become one of the NBA’s preeminent franchise centerpieces.

His in-season workouts are more routine than those summertime sessions, going through usual warmups with Oklahoma City’s coaches before games, practices or in open gyms. But the offseason is when Gilgeous-Alexander’s approach stands out, because no one of his level does it like him: with the same group of loyal friends who never sniffed the NBA and with a slew of live defenders at all times hustling until their hearts feel like they’ll give out just to gang up on a slithery scorer.

It’s no wonder that Gilgeous-Alexander’s game doesn’t look like anyone else’s.

“He’s ahead of his time,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said in a conversation with The Athletic. “Intuitively, he’s where the scientific research is, which is you wanna be making decisions. You want randomness in your workouts. You want variability. You want interweaving in the workout. He kinda does that naturally.”

And the science doesn’t end there.

From a young age, Gilgeous-Alexander understood he had to compensate for a once-slight frame. He estimates he was only 5-7 at 13 years old, though others who knew him then claim he was 5-6.

“I was puny,” he said in a recent interview with The Athletic. “I was like my mom’s height.”

In a tall man’s game, this presented issues. Gilgeous-Alexander’s first solution? Outwork everybody.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s former club coach, Dwayne Washington, was a teacher at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, the first high school the future star attended. At only 13, he asked a favor of Washington: Could teachers open up the gym at 6 a.m. daily so he could conduct workouts before school?

“I was like, ‘Oh man, nobody ever asked that,’” said Washington, who remembered becoming emotional after receiving the request. “He’s very, very consistent and very disciplined, more than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Washington can’t recall Gilgeous-Alexander taking a morning off — from eighth grade through the end of high school. If he or another teacher were unable to unlock the doors on a particular day, Gilgeous-Alexander would go to the local YMCA instead, arriving there at 5 a.m.

This was just the start.

Washington, a native New Yorker who learned the game from watching local, herky-jerky guards such as Rod Strickland, was not just a basketball coach and physical education teacher; he also taught science. His goal with Gilgeous-Alexander, a bright student obsessed with the game, was to mesh his two areas of expertise.

“I’m a nerd,” Washington said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

The best way for Gilgeous-Alexander to compensate for his size was to fiddle with timing. Washington taught him about acceleration and deceleration, about how slowing down quickly could create as much space as speeding up just as fast.

He compared Gilgeous-Alexander to a car with four gears, telling his student never to rev to fourth gear, where he could too easily lose the wheel.

“You’re never gonna be faster than Allen Iverson,” Washington explained to him. “But what you can do is control your gears.”

He surmised an on-court formula for Gilgeous-Alexander: Go from third gear to first gear, then first gear to third gear, then ease down to second gear and then first again before ratcheting back up to second. Avoid shifts from second to third gear; that would be too predictable. As Washington advised Gilgeous-Alexander, even a rocket can’t throttle where it wants if the opponent knows where it’s going.

“I was always a quick learner,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “So I always tried to soak things up and just get better as fast as I could and use them instinctually throughout the years.”

Washington directed Gilgeous-Alexander to move diligently enough that he could spin in a new direction, if necessary. His strides would have to remain short, already an elite skill of Gilgeous-Alexander. He’d implore the guard to count in his head as he maneuvered through gears — “one thousand one, one thousand two” — just to master the timing.

That was physics. Next was biology. They worked on breathing techniques.

“Most people wanna go, go, go,” Washington said.

But not Gilgeous-Alexander. Controlled breathing would keep the heart rate down. The calmer the player was, the more composed he could be shifting from third to first gear and back again to third.

Finally, geometry.

Washington believed too many players viewed a basketball court as a canvas for straight lines. A driver starts at point A and wants to dart to point B. But there are more options to consider.

He taught Gilgeous-Alexander about the strength of triangles. If a defender stopped him from fighting to point B, that would be just dandy, as long as Gilgeous-Alexander targeted a point C, too.

“Make them think they beat you to the spot and then you actually go the way you really wanna go,” Washington said. “So, sometimes you use their strength to your advantage. If they’re faster than you, let them be faster than you. If they stop you, let them. They got there first. But you never have to rush.”

Gilgeous-Alexander would bring notebooks to his workouts, writing down each drill Washington taught him, which became a tradition.

“I wasn’t gonna remember on the fly,” Gilgeous-Alexander said.

He jotted down drills from other coaches and began watching trainers and his favorite players on YouTube, taking notes about what he observed, then attempting to replicate them in the gym.

During his free time, he read the notebooks “like it was homework,” Washington remembered.

“What’s unique about him is he’s player-led. He’s not coach-led,” Daigneault said.

Only one man holds the secret to stopping Gilgeous-Alexander, and he won’t share it.

Lu Dort knows the leader of the Thunder well. A fellow Canadian, he began competing against Gilgeous-Alexander when he was 13. They have been teammates in Oklahoma City for six seasons. And Dort, an All-Defense candidate, insists he is the one person who can stop this otherwise untamable scorer. At least, this is what he tells Gilgeous-Alexander regularly, though his strategy will remain inside his brain.

“I can’t go into details like that,” Dort said during a one-on-one conversation when pressed for a hint. “I don’t know who’s gonna read this. … But yeah, he won’t get over his average (against me). I mean that, for real.”

Despite the length of their relationship, Dort didn’t realize the breadth of Gilgeous-Alexander’s basketball knowledge until his rookie year with the Thunder. The two lived together in a five-bedroom home just outside of Oklahoma City in 2019-20, then traveled to the NBA Bubble during the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was not much to do other than play or watch ball.

When they flipped on games, Gilgeous-Alexander would point out nuances on the court. A defender would get caught on his heels, and he would explain what move should follow. Another would help from the weak side, and he would mention the open passing lane and how to exploit it.

Dort’s favorite Gilgeous-Alexander move is the stepback jumper going left, which isn’t new. Gilgeous-Alexander already had that one perfected by the time he got to high school.

Gilgeous-Alexander is Dale Earnhardt, the NBA’s preeminent driver. He blisters to the hoop more than anyone else in the league. The Thunder score 119.8 points per 100 possessions directly off his drives, according to Second Spectrum, second only to Kevin Durant among NBA high-volume drivers.

He twirls defenders out of their shoes when he plants for the stepback special. His speed shows best while he’s slowing down.

“You’ll be watching it and be like, ‘Yeah, my knees can’t do that,” Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein said.

The midrange stepback going left is another example of Gilgeous-Alexander, a right-handed shooter, doing things his way. When driving this season, he goes left 57 percent of the time. He looks comfortable enough veering that way that some defenses will actually scheme to force him to his strong hand.

This was not always the case.

“I was very right-hand dominant from until I was, like, 9 (years old),” Gilgeous-Alexander said.

Determined to change that, he began to build left-hand coordination. A 9-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander put himself through dribbling drills using only his left hand, layups only with his left and floaters only with his left.

“Sometimes I’d go to the gym and not touch the ball with my right hand,” he said.

By the time he was 12, he had grown more ambidextrous. He had the skill, just not the size.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s first growth spurt arrived from eighth to ninth grade, when he sprouted to 5-10. In 10th grade, he was 6-2. A year later, he reached 6-4, then finally 6-6.

He didn’t stand out on the national circuit until he was large enough for anyone to notice him. He tried out for Team Canada at 14, hoping to land on one of the junior teams, but he got cut. Gilgeous-Alexander fell short in the next two years. Eventually, at 17, he made the senior national team.

“I always thought I was better than I was,” he said.

Now, he keeps good company, the commander of Team Canada, though arguably not the top dog in his family. His mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, was an All-American at Alabama and a two-time Olympian in track and field. She still playfully jabs at her son for making twice as many Olympics as he has.

But she’s never drained a stepback over Jrue Holiday.

In the age of the 3-pointer, to no one’s surprise, Gilgeous-Alexander isn’t operating like other high-volume guards, many of whom chuck up long balls without a filter.

Only about a quarter of his shots come from deep, though he’s added more 3s to his game this season, hitting 37 percent of them. He’s never hoisted this many off the dribble.

He feasts from the short midrange, where he’s nailing more than 50 percent of his attempts, and gets to the basket and free-throw line often. Among players who finish an above-average number of their team’s possessions with a shot, a turnover or a drawn foul, he ranks fourth in the NBA in true-shooting percentage, an all-encompassing metric that accounts for the value of 2-pointers, 3s and free throws. He rarely turns it over, too.

Usually, the more usage increases, the more efficiency goes the other way. That’s not happening in Oklahoma, where Gilgeous-Alexander, ignored through adolescence, has forged his path to join basketball’s elite.

“It’s like LeBron (James) in his prime, Giannis (Antetokounmpo), the speed of (Ja) Morant, the speed and power of (Russell) Westbrook; he’s a great athlete, but he’s not an overpowering athlete, where those guys are,” Daigneault said. “And yet, he gets to the same places on the floor as they do. And to me, that says it all about the skill.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Zach Beeker/NBAE via Getty Images)