For the first time in about 20 years, the NBA's MVP race might actually be, well, a race.
At least, it feels like there's at least some intrigue regarding who'll wind up winning the Michael Jordan Trophy later this spring.
Oklahoma City's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the clear favorite to win the MVP award again, which makes a lot of sense. He's the best player on the league's best team, and he has similar numbers to when he was the runaway winner a year
ago.
But there are more legitimate candidates than there have seemed to be in past years. Denver's Nikola Jokic remains a perennial candidate and is putting together a season the likes of which have never been seen in NBA history. San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama has made clear that he wants the award. Boston's Jaylen Brown has been hearing MVP chants from adoring fans for months, a thank-you of sorts for how he kept the injury-riddled Celtics near the top of the Eastern Conference standings.
“I think it’s good for the league,” Gilgeous-Alexander said a few days ago when asked about the MVP race. “I think it’s good chatter. It gives people something to talk about. There’s a lot of good players in this league and a lot of guys in the conversation because of that.”
And nobody even knows yet if the Los Angeles Lakers' Luka Doncic, who will win the scoring title, will even be eligible and listed on the awards ballot. He's going to finish the regular season just shy of the league's 65-game minimum, and his representation has said an appeal seeking a hardship exemption on his behalf will be filed.
Some comments on some of the MVP frontrunners:
— Thunder coach Mark Daigneault on Gilgeous-Alexander: "This has nothing to do with the award. But he’s better. You know, he’s continued to learn how to manipulate defense. He’s as efficient as he’s ever been, and then in the invisible spaces, just his leadership and what he does for our team just can’t be overstated. He's just an unbelievable leader by example. ... He wants to be one of the greats, but he wants to be one of the guys.”
— Wembanyama on Jokic: “The best offensive player in the world.”
— Nuggets coach David Adelman, on Jokic and Wembanyama after a Spurs-Nuggets game last weekend: “You’re not going to see two people like this in many generations. The size of both these guys ... we were laughing at the jump ball. I mean, Jok walks out. Jok's a big guy. He looks like a guard, jumping center with Wemby. I don’t know. It’s just good for basketball.”
— Lakers coach JJ Redick, on Doncic: “He's playing as well as anyone in basketball.”
— Spurs coach Mitch Johnson, on Wembanyama: “He affects as much of the game in every single way — on the court, on both ends, with and without the ball, what the other team tries to do, plan for, scheme, adjust to, on both sides of the basketball, in my very ignorant opinion, as much as any other player I’ve ever seen.”
Voting will be done next week by a panel of reporters and broadcasters who cover the league. And in every season starting with 2006-07, the eventual MVP has gotten at least 64% of the first-place votes.
Oddsmakers, including BetMGM Sportsbook, seem to think this could be another runaway. Gilgeous-Alexander is listed with odds of -10000 — meaning a $100 wager on him to be the MVP would return $101, or a profit of $1.
That seems fairly overwhelming.
The last time a winner didn’t get half of the first-place votes was in 2005-06, when Steve Nash won the second of his back-to-back MVPs.
A look at the numbers of each of the top candidates, entering Thursday:
— Gilgeous-Alexander: 31.1 points, 4.3 rebounds, 6.6 assists per game. Thunder are 56-12 when he plays, and he’s scored at least 20 points in every game this season — extending his NBA record streak.
— Jokic: 27.8 points, 12.9 rebounds, 10.9 assists per game. He’s a full rebound and assist per game better than everyone else, and he’s shooting 57% despite being every opponent’s center of defensive attention.
— Wembanyama: 24.8 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 3.1 blocks per game. A 7-foot-4 guy with a shooter’s touch, guard skills, a willing passer and an absolute defensive menace who seems to still be getting better.
— Brown: 28.8 points, 7.0 rebounds, 5.2 assists per game. It’s well-documented that Boston rather enjoyed proving those who thought the Celtics would plummet this year without Jayson Tatum wrong. Brown is why the Celtics stayed in the race.
— Doncic: 33.5 points, 7.7 rebounds, 8.3 assists per game. He’s not eligible and would need an NBA ruling to help. But maybe his MVP candidacy is best described thusly: The Lakers look like title contenders with him, and look wildly different without him.
Jokic is going to average a triple-double. Somehow, that's almost never enough.
He's going to become the first player to ever lead the league in rebounds per game and assists per game in the same season; Wilt Chamberlain was the NBA's assist and rebound champion in 1967-68, when the league recognized totals — not averages — as its statistical leader. Chamberlain didn't lead the league in assists per game that season.
It'll be the seventh time in NBA history that a player winds up averaging a triple-double. Jokic also did it last season, Russell Westbrook did it four times in a five-season span from 2016-17 through 2020-21 (the COVID-interrupted season of 2019-20 was the exception), and Oscar Robertson did it in 1961-62.
Here's the weird thing: Of the previous six triple-double-average seasons, only one — Westbrook in 2016-17, when he also led the league in scoring — was deemed MVP-worthy.
Jokic was second last year. Westbrook was fifth in 2017-18, 10th in 2018-19 and 11th in 2020-21 — with exactly zero first-place votes in any of those years. And Robertson was third in the MVP vote for 1961-62.
Gilgeous-Alexander, Wembanyama, Jokic or Doncic would extend the run of international players winning MVP to eight years and counting.
Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo, of Greek and Nigerian descent, won in 2019 and 2020. Jokic, a Serbian, won in 2021, 2022 and 2024. Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, who was born in Cameroon but has since become a U.S. citizen, won the award in 2023. And Gilgeous-Alexander, of Canada, won last year.
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