Rumors

“I always felt as soon as [a] basketball touched my hands, I was gonna somehow make it to the NBA,” McBride said. “And I feel like you have to be not delusional in a sense, but you have to have this different self-belief to achieve great things. And I always had this positive mindset that I could do it if I just put the work in. So honestly, from the day I started playing basketball, I had a belief that I could make it to the NBA.”

Binghamton University

“I know what I want to do with this game and ultimately, very few do,” Shai tells me. “I knew that if I got an opportunity, that I’d work hard enough and take advantage of it.” He thinks about his time before blowing up with the University of Kentucky’s legendary hoops program: how, as a high schooler from Canada sharing a bedroom with Nickeil in their coach’s home in Tennessee, he didn’t make the McDonald’s All-American Game. How he only had one offer from lowly Binghamton University, and how, upon signing with Kentucky, he became the team’s lowest-rated recruit. There’s a big gap from there to here: getting picked 11th by the Los Angeles Clippers in 2018, and now signing a max contract—five years, $172 million —extension with OKC this summer. “Ever since then, I never looked back. I want to be one of the best point guards to ever play,” he says. “I’m not playing this game just to be a good basketball player. I want to be one of the greatest to ever play.”

GQ.com