Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player alive. Period. End of debate. Anyone saying otherwise does not know ball. He just became the first player ever to have a 30/20/20 game and it wouldn’t rank among the 15 greatest Nikola Jokic games I’ve ever seen him play, all while he is averaging a triple double on the season, ranking third in the NBA in points, second in assists and third in rebounds. He is the king of fancy stats, ranking first in PER, VORP, BMP, OBPM, OWS, win shares per 48 minutes, as well as the NBA’s player impact estimate and offensive rating. The Denver Nuggets are notorious for cratering the moment he leaves the floor, making “non-Jokic minutes” a central part of the NBA’s nomenclature. He is, by every single standard of what those words mean in a literal sense, the NBA’s most valuable player.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (SGA) is also having a phenomenal year. His name is right next to Jokic in all these statistical rankings, and he is a deserving MVP, but he is not the NBA’s best player. He wasn’t before the Nuggets and Thunder just split a back-to-back in Oklahoma City the last two days, and he isn’t today either. Those two games between two players who play two very different positions should have very little bearing on the MVP race, but after the Nuggets’ victory last night, there are already headlines out there from big outlets like “Is Nikola Jokic About to Steal MVP?” and “Nikola Jokic Storms Back Into MVP Race.”
This kind of phrasing shows you how the MVP debate has become an industry unto itself, robbing the award of its power as the culmination of six-plus months of impossibly hard work night in and night out. “Stealing” an award that is given out at the end of the season isn’t a thing, yet this is how NBA media frames the race every year in their bid to get us to argue with each other for six straight months. Both SGA and Jokic have had MVP-caliber seasons, placing themselves head and shoulders above the rest of the NBA, but the only way that Jokic could “steal” this award with over a month left in the season is if the award itself has lost all meaning and now is just a cudgel for sportswriters to create content with.
While I am sympathetic to writers struggling to fill the internet’s insatiable need for ever more content, I am dismayed by what this endless hot-take cycle has done to the NBA’s preeminent celebration of individual achievement. I know this is nothing new, as the Nash-Kobe debates proved, but the fight over Jokic since just before his first MVP in 2021 sparked my passion to recognize NBA greatness instead of just bickering over it like we usually do. In just a few years, I have gone from getting white-hot mad at Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins for questioning Jokic’s greatness on ESPN to not caring one iota about any of this stupid invented bullshit. Jokic is the best basketball player alive right now and I know if you disagree that I don’t have to take you seriously as a ball knower.
Nikola Jokic won a Finals MVP on a championship march that went through Anthony Edwards and Karl Anthony-Towns, Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, LeBron James and Anthony Davis, and Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, demonstrating that he can maintain his ability at the highest level, and he has nothing to prove to anyone anymore. SGA doesn’t either, save for joining Jokic by doing it in the NBA Finals, as his greatness over the past few years has been proven to ball knowers too.
Another thing I despise about the NBA’s interminable MVP debates is how fans are incentivized to tear down the other guy–both these players are freakin’ incredible! For all my bluster about Jokic, I have to point out that SGA is out here putting up Michael Jordan stat lines like that’s a normal thing to do, averaging nearly 33 points per game on over 50 percent shooting for freakin’ guard while playing some of the best defense in the entire NBA. Give out two MVPs this year, who cares?
Whether SGA or Jokic wins MVP will be entirely driven by whatever narrative the voters decide to land on at the end of the year, and not by some consistent standard applied to measure what most valuable actually means. Maybe right now it’s “woah the guy who’s been averaging a triple double all season is coming from behind to take SGA’s award after going 1-1 against him the last two days!” but that just proves it could be anything else again in a month. Whoever wins between Jokic and SGA will have earned the official title of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, but it is an increasingly meaningless one.
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