A recent straw poll among NBA awards voters found that around 70% said that they would vote for Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić if the MVP vote were held today. With three quarters of the season in the books, it is safe to say that Jokić is the current MVP favorite. As the title of this post indicates, I do not think he should win a third straight MVP award. Why?
Let me get this out of the way right now. I am a big Nikola Jokić fan. He is a phenomenal player, easily one of the best in the league. He probably is, as some have already argued, the best passing big man in league history. If I were able to vote on the NBA end-of-season awards, I would have voted for him to win MVP in 2021, when he won his first. Last year, when Jokić won his second award, I would have voted for Joel Embiid over him. But I, and most actual voters, seemed to agree that it was a three way race between Jokić, Joel Embiid, and Giannis Antetokounmpo. The 2021-2022 Nuggets (i.e. last year’s team), riddled with injuries, managed to win 48 games and make the playoffs entirely on the back of his consistent, hard-earned brilliance. It was a really impressive season.
Put simply, he has the potential to be one of the greatest players ever.
The wonderful Zach Lowe says that people should not vote against Jokić simply because they don’t feel like giving him a third straight MVP award. I agree. So here are a few reasons for giving the award to someone else this year. Let’s call them history, legacy, and standards.
History: Only three players in NBA history have won three MVPs in a row. They are Bill Russell (1960-63), Wilt Chamberlain (1965-68), and Larry Bird (1983-86). These three are widely regarded as three of the ten best players ever. Are we really ready to elevate Jokić into this group? MVP voters may feign ignorance but history matters. Winning three MVP awards in a row is virtually unprecedented. A number of the best players ever did not achieve it—Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry West, and Oscar Robertson all failed, just to name a few. Several of those players did not even win three MVP awards over the course of their careers, let alone three in a row. For those interested, only eight players in league history have won three or more MVP awards. To win three MVP awards, especially in a row, is to scale the top of the NBA legacy mountain.
So, on to my second point: legacy. To vote for Jokić to win a third straight MVP is not to act in a vacuum. It is to vote for the most prestigious regular season award in a league with a long history. To repeat my question from above, are we ready to elevate Jokić into this rarified air in 2023? No, we should not be. Not yet. One year ago, for the NBA’s 75th anniversary, a list of the 75 greatest players ever was “selected by a blue-ribbon panel of current and former NBA players, coaches, general managers and team and league executives, WNBA legends and sportswriters and broadcasters.” These voters did not put Jokić in the top 75 a year ago. This might sound like a snub but it made sense, for as of last year he had not yet accomplished enough.
Again, because I am a fan, I think he will. Who knows how high he will stand in the pantheon when he retires? I’m bullish on Jokić. His Nuggets should be considered one of the main title favorites this year. The fact that some of those making the strongest case for Jokić’s third straight MVP are not betting on the Nuggets to win the title calls into question how seriously they take their own arguments. In what world do you have a team led by an all-time great player, a surrounding roster deep with talent that is well-coached, with the number one seed in the West, and they aren’t one of the favorites?
Some commentators have pointed to the 1996-1997 season, when Michael Jordan was clearly the best player in the league but Karl Malone won the MVP award, seemingly out of voter fatigue. In hindsight most consider this a mistake. People didn’t vote for Jordan because they were tired of giving him the award every year? So what, he was the best player! (No offense to Karl Malone). But as I will elaborate below, that season is not analogous to this. Jordan was the undisputed best player in the NBA for the 1996, 1997, and 1998 seasons. He should have won the MVP award all three years. This is not the same. As brilliant as Jokić is, he is not the undisputed best player in the world, and that matters. Time to consider what it means to be the best in more detail.
So finally, standards. What does it mean to be the most valuable player? What criteria do we use to assess this? Is the MVP the best player in the league? The best player on the best team? The most valuable? It’s not clear exactly what it means or how to differentiate between these potential options. What we can say about the standards for MVP voting is that they have evolved over time but are still not singular, obvious, or objective. There is no single statistic we can use to resolve these questions and there is plenty of room for taste and judgment.
Let’s look further into standards for MVP. Nikola Jokić is a remarkable, truly great basketball player. He is also not unequivocally the best player in the league. Many players, coaches, and analysts would pick Giannis if asked to pick one player to lead their team into the playoffs. This suggests that, when push comes to shove, many consider Giannis to be the best player in the NBA. And Giannis is definitely MVP eligible—he hasn’t missed many games. His team, the Milwaukee Bucks, also has roughly the same record as the Nuggets. Why exactly is it a runaway for Jokić?
Now let’s have a look at the stats, both conventional and advanced. The case is not a slam dunk for anyone. Among the best players, four seem like good candidates. (Kevin Durant and Steph Curry have missed too many games and Luka Dončić, an early favorite, has not been quite good enough. No one else should be in the conversation). So it’s Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Jayson Tatum.
As of March 2nd, through 55 games, Jokić is averaging 24.6 points, 11.7 rebounds, and 10.0 assists per game. Impressive stuff. If he maintains these averages he will join Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook as the only players in NBA history to average a triple-double for an entire season. In addition, he is shooting a very impressive 63.3% from the field, 39.8% from three, and 82.2% from the line. According to both regular and effective field goal percentages this is the best shooting season of his career.
But the conventional numbers of the others are impressive as well. Embiid is averaging 33.0 points per game, 10.4 rebounds per game, and 4.1 assists per game, though he has played seven fewer games than Jokić. The numbers for Giannis are just as bonkers: 31.3 points per game, 12.0 rebounds per game, and 5.4 assists, though he also has played five fewer games than Jokić. Finally, Tatum is averaging 30.3 points per game, 8.7 rebounds per game, and 4.7 assists per game. Tatum has also played 59 games, four more than Jokić. None of these conventional stats stand out as obviously superior to the others and all are, in part, contingent on the positions each of them plays, the quality of their teammates, and the style of their teams.
Also, if we think in terms of MVP as the best player on the best team, the four teams they play for are virtually tied in the standings as of March 2nd. The Bucks at 45-17, the Celtics at 45-18, the 76ers at 40-21, and out West the Nuggets at 44-19. Again, no real room to differentiate.
But it is 2023 and we have one more thing to consider, a bevy of advanced stats, or as Zach Lowe playfully terms them, the “vorps, worps, and schnorps.” Once again, however, the advanced stats are not perfect, nor do they uniformly paint Jokić as the best in the league. For instance, ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus currently has Jayson Tatum at number one, Embiid at number two, Lebron at number three, and Jokić at number four. This is a powerful catch-all stat but it is not perfect—Giannis currently ranks eleventh and Durant an absurd 38th.
It is true that Jokić leads in three major advanced stats—VORP (value over replacement player), BPM (box plus/minus), and WS/48 (win shares per 48 minutes). And this is where many think his case is at its strongest. But note two things—the advanced stats are also very impressive for the other contenders and, more importantly, advanced stats are notoriously bad at capturing defensive value. For instance, Giannis is generally recognized as the best defender in this group (he and Jaren Jackson Jr are considered the top candidates for Defensive Player of the Year this season) and yet his defensive box plus minus, which feeds into the broader BPM score, is much lower than Jokić. No offense to Jokić but he is not in Giannis’ league as a defender. Indeed, he might be the weakest defender of the four top candidates.
Given that so much of the case for Jokić winning his third straight MVP award rests on advanced stats that inflate his defensive value, I will say with moderate confidence that Jokić is roughly tied with several other players for the title of best in the league.
So should he win a third straight MVP? In a word, no. Given that this league has a history, and awards are not isolated but add to and accumulate across resumes, winning a third straight MVP is too much, too soon. Not only would it prematurely coronate him as one of the greatest to ever play but it would also imply, in retrospect, that he was far and away the best player of his time, which is simply not true. In a league with so much talent, with players like Giannis, Embiid, and Tatum, not to mention the returning-from-injury Durant and Curry, it does not make sense to give anyone three MVP awards in a row.
Having said that, I will now sit back and hopefully watch Jokić put together what he has not yet fully achieved—one of the greatest careers of all time.
*stats and history from basketball-reference.com and NBA.com.