Watching fellow Canadian Shai Gilgeous-Alexander be announced as this season's NBA MVP left Steve Nash brimming with pride.
And then the moment got better.
Nash — until this week, the first and only Canadian to win the MVP award — was someone that Gilgeous-Alexander identified in his MVP acceptance speech Wednesday night as one of his basketball inspirations.
“It means the world,” Nash, the 2005 and 2006 MVP, said Thursday in a video conference with a small group of reporters. “I don’t need it. And at the same time, there’s no better feeling than watching these guys thrive and them saying you had an impact on them. That makes it all worthwhile and special. And I don’t know if there could be very few compliments higher than that.”
Gilgeous-Alexander — the NBA's scoring champion — got 71 of a possible 100 first-place votes to win the award, one that he received from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Thursday night just before he and the Oklahoma City Thunder hosted the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals.
“For you, it's always been team first,” Silver told Gilgeous-Alexander, just before handing him the trophy at midcourt. “But you led this team to the best record in the NBA and the most wins in franchise history. Congratulations.”
Gilgeous-Alexander then hoisted the Michael Jordan Trophy as the crowd roared and his teammates moved in for yet another round of applause.
He was the best player on the best team, a club that went 68-14 in the regular season and set an NBA record for point differential.
“This is a very special moment for me,” Nash said. “I genuinely get super excited to see his success. He’s really probably my favorite player to watch and let’s hope he continues on this trajectory and continues to rack up seasons like this and represent himself and his country and his team the way he has been. He’s phenomenal.”
Gilgeous-Alexander was just a little kid, 5 or 6 years old, when Nash won his MVP awards. But he was long touted as Canada's next great one — the basketball version, that is — and now he has delivered.
Like Nash, Gilgeous-Alexander is also a cornerstone of Canada's national program. Gilgeous-Alexander led Canada to a bronze medal at the 2023 World Cup, a finish that qualified the team for the 2024 Paris Olympics, and it would seem likely that the 2028 Los Angeles Games are on the Thunder star's radar as well.
There were 25 Canadian-born players who scored in the NBA this season, including seven — Gilgeous-Alexander, Jamal Murray, RJ Barrett, Shaedon Sharpe, Bennedict Mathurin, Andrew Wiggins and Dillon Brooks — who had more than 1,000 points. No country outside of the U.S. had more 1,000-point scorers than that.
“He set the foundation,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of Nash. “He was the first Canadian basketball player I knew of. And without seeing guys go to the NBA from Canada, it wouldn’t have been as much of a dream as it was for us as kids growing up.”
AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba
Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander looks on following Game 1 of an NBA basketball Western Conference Finals playoff series against the Minnesota Timberwolves Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings)
NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of nurses at some of New York City's biggest hospitals could go on strike Monday during a severe flu season, three years after a similar walkout forced some of the same medical facilities to transfer some patients and divert ambulances.
The looming strike could impact operations at several of the city’s major private hospitals, including Mount Sinai in Manhattan, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Nearly 15,000 nurses could walk off the job early Monday if a deal is not reached, amounting to the largest nurses strike in city history, according to Nancy Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association. As of Sunday morning, little progress had been made at the bargaining table, Hagans said. A vast majority of the union's nurses voted to authorize the strike last month.
Like the 2023 labor fight, this year's dispute involves a complicated array of issues, claims, counterclaims and hospital-by-hospital particulars. Once again, staffing levels are a major flashpoint: Nurses say the big-budget medical centers are refusing to commit to — or even backsliding on — provisions for manageable, safe workloads.
This time, the nurses' union also wants guardrails on hospitals using artificial intelligence, plus more workplace security measures. A gunman strode into Mount Sinai in November, and a man with a sharp object barricaded himself in a Brooklyn hospital room this week; both men ultimately were killed by police.
The private, nonprofit hospitals involved in the current negotiations say they've made strides in staffing since 2023. Some of them suggest the union's demands, taken as a whole, are far too expensive.
Scores of nurses rallied Friday in Manhattan, insisting their primary concern was proper caregiving and accusing the medical centers — whose top executives make millions of dollars a year — of greed and intransigence.
“My hospital tries to cut corners on staffing every day, and then they try to fight historic gains we made three years ago,” said Sophie Boland, a pediatric intensive care nurse in the NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system.
The hospitals, meanwhile, have called the union’s strike threat “reckless.” They vowed in a statement Thursday to “do whatever is necessary to minimize disruptions.”
Hagans, the union president, has also stressed that patients should not delay care during a potential strike.
Still, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul expressed concern that a strike could affect patient care, urging both sides on Friday “to stay at the table and get a deal done.”
Mount Sinai has hired over 1,000 temporary nurses and held preparatory drills for a strike that could affect its 1,100-bed main hospital and two affiliates — Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West — with about 500 beds each.
NewYork-Presbyterian said it also had arranged for temporary nurses but, if the strike happens, some patients might be moved to new rooms or advised to transfer to another facility. Montefiore posted a message assuring patients that appointments would be kept.
The same union mounted a three-day strike at the Mount Sinai flagship facility and Montefiore in 2023, when nurses emphasized their sacrifices during the exhausting, frightening height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national nurse staffing crisis that followed.
The walkout prompted those hospitals to postpone non-emergency surgeries, tell many ambulances to go elsewhere and transfer some intensive-care infants and other patients. Temporary nurses and even administrators with clinical backgrounds were tapped to fill in, but some patients noticed longer waits and more sparsely staffed wards.
The strike ended with an agreement on raises totaling 19% over three years and staffing improvements, including the possibility of extra pay if nurses had to work short-handed.
Now, the union says, the hospitals are retreating from those guarantees and falling short on other promises.
Montefiore, for example, agreed to “make all reasonable efforts” to stop keeping some emergency room patients in hallways while they wait for space to open up in other wards. Yet three years later, nurses still scramble to treat “hallway patients,” Montefiore intensive care nurse Michelle Gonzalez said Friday.
Montefiore has suggested it's made some progress: The hospital told elected officials in a letter in October that there has been a 35% reduction in the time it takes from emergency admission to a clinical unit bed.
Overall, the hospitals say they have greatly reduced nursing job vacancy rates in the last three years, and Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia Irving University Medical Center say they also have added hundreds of nursing positions.
In recent days, several smaller hospitals — including multiple Northwell Health facilities on Long Island — averted potential walkouts by striking deals or making what the union viewed as adequate progress.
FILE - A medical worker transports a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital, April 1, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
