Who will be the 2026 Canadian athlete of the year?

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On Tuesday, NBA star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won the Northern Star Award as Canada's athlete of the year for the second time, beating out swimming phenom Summer McIntosh in a vote by sports-media people from around the country.

They made the right call. During this calendar year, Gilgeous-Alexander completed one of the best seasons ever by an NBA player, sweeping the regular-season and Finals MVP awards, winning the scoring title and capturing his first championship with the Oklahoma City Thunder. And SGA has continued to dominate this season, powering OKC to a 23-1 record while leading the league in points per possession and ranking second in points per game behind Lakers gunner Luka Doncic, who has played far more minutes (the Thunder have been blowing out their opponents so routinely that SGA has played in the fourth quarter just 11 times in his 24 games).

Still, we shouldn't just gloss over what McIntosh accomplished this year.

At the Canadian trials in June, the 18-year-old sensation became the first swimmer since Michael Phelps at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to break three different individual world records at the same meet. At the ensuing world championships in Singapore, McIntosh set an audacious goal of matching Phelps' record of five solo gold medals. She came very close, winning four golds in her 200-400m comfort zone and taking bronze in the 800m freestyle — a distance she picked up just a few months earlier so she could challenge American star Katie Ledecky (the only other woman to win four golds at a single worlds) in her signature race. In the 200m