A few weeks remain in announcing the NBA’s most valuable player, but what Nikola Jokić recently has brought into focus is the hard choice voters will have to make.
Jokić’s historic triple-double, 31 points, 22 assists and 21 rebounds, in the Denver Nuggets’ overtime win over the Phoenix Suns on Friday had never been done before and stands representative of the kind of season the reigning and three-time MVP is putting together.
Meanwhile, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player on arguably the best team and deserves to be considered for the NBA’s top individual honor. (The Cleveland Cavaliers may finish with the league’s best record, but none of their stars’ numbers are good enough for consideration.)
Also, what has happened in Los Angeles recently has thrust a certain 40-year-old and four-time league MVP into the conversation once again. Or has it?
The Athletic’s NBA experts Joe Vardon, Sam Amick, David Aldridge, Mike Vorkunov and Fred Katz shared their thoughts on the MVP race.
Vorkunov: This is a razor-thin race and will be the NBA’s equivalent of the men’s 100-meter dash at the 2024 Summer Olympics. While I don’t have an official MVP vote, I’d have Jokić as the winner. It’s a hard decision, for sure, and Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player on the team with the league’s second-best record. He leads the league in scoring — by a whopping two points per game — and his shooting efficiency numbers are the highest of his career. But Jokić is having as great a season for a team with significantly less talent.
The beauty of the Thunder is their overwhelming talent, but in Denver, Jokić is the system. He’s averaging a triple-double and shooting a ridiculous 43 percent from 3. The Thunder have three players in the top 20 of estimated plus-minus (EPM) and a few more behind them. Jokić has led the Nuggets to the third-best record in the Western Conference with Jamal Murray struggling for a good portion of the season and a 36-year-old Westbrook playing an important role. The advanced analytics don’t give us a clear winner — Gilgeous-Alexander leads in EPM, while Jokić leads in DARKO daily plus-minus (DPM) — so the tiebreaker here is the help around each.
It gets back to the old, annoying, ambiguous word: valuable. No one has been more valuable in the NBA this season than Jokić.
Amick: Gilgeous-Alexander might win, and truth be told, I might vote for him. But the longer I’ve looked at Jokić’s body of work and pondered the phenomenon that is voter fatigue, the more I’ve realized that it is imperative to analyze his case as if he hadn’t already won the award three times before — or, really, as if he hadn’t ever won it at all.
The irony of that edict, of course, is that one has to compare this MVP-caliber season to his others to truly understand why it must be appreciated and, potentially, honored. To wit …
- Points: He’s averaging a career-high 28.8 per game. His previous high was 27.1 in his 2021-22 MVP campaign.
- Rebounds: He’s at 12.9 per game, his second-best mark in his 10 seasons. His career high is 13.8 during his 2021-22 campaign.
- Assists: He’s dishing out 10.5 per game. His previous high was 9.8 in his 2022-23 MVP campaign.
- Efficiency: A true-shooting percentage of 66.0, the third-highest of his career behind his 70.1 mark when he took second in MVP voting behind the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid in 2022-23 and the 66.1 he posted during his second MVP campaign. His career-high 3-point percentage of 43.0, on a career-high 4.5 attempts per, is 4.2 percent better than his previous high (38.8 during his 2020-21 campaign).
- On-off: Entering Sunday, the Nuggets were 20.2 points better, per 100 possessions, when Jokić is on the floor. That swing, which is now significantly better than Gilgeous-Alexander’s on-off mark (15.5), is better than two of his MVP seasons (8.9 in 2020-21 and 16.3 in 2021-22; he had a mark of 20.4 last season). In terms of value — the literal description of the award — this stat is always among the most telling.
- Player efficiency rating (PER): He was at 32.5 entering Sunday, a league-leading mark and the second-best mark of his career (32.8 in 2021-22 was his high).
Don’t get the wrong idea: There is no verdict just yet. But everyone needs to be clear-eyed about what we’re seeing: An all-time great who has been on a historic tear these past four seasons, could be argued as someone who should have won the last four MVPs, and is playing better than he ever has. That’s not the kind of reality that should be overlooked.
At this point, my top five would be Jokić, Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jayson Tatum and LeBron James.
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Aldridge: In our current societal spasming, where it is better to be loud and ill-informed than quiet and knowledgeable, I’ll be accused of not coming strong to the mic when I say it’s a coin flip right now between Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić. There’s a clear case to be made for either man.
Gilgeous-Alexander leads the league in scoring and is close to joining the “180 Club,” by virtue of his current splits (52.5/37.2/89.9 entering play Sunday), on a career-high usage of 33.6, per Basketball-Reference.com. He is unstoppable; he can get to his spots whenever he wants, and you can’t affect his shot. He’s mastered, the way Stephen Curry has, the seemingly diametrically opposite way of being both his team’s alpha male and one of the guys. He insists his teammates be there for every walk-off interview.
He finished second to Jokić in the MVP vote last year; who’d object if they reversed roles this year?
Yet you have to stop here, when you’re ready to give it to Gilgeous-Alexander, and reiterate how incredible Jokić remains.
Jokić is averaging a triple-double – and, yes, that’s amazing. But he’s also on pace to shatter his individual career highs in 3-point percentage (43.9) and steals (1.8 per game). Along with the aforementioned, he’s excelling in true-shooting percentage and other advanced stats. And, his usage is still near his career highs.
I was at Jokić’s career-best 56-point game against the Washington Wizards in December. What was remarkable was how … unremarkable it seemed. The Nuggets were playing terribly, and Murray was out and injured. So, Jokić, basically, took every shot in the third quarter. Denver was so bad at the time that Michael Malone couldn’t take him off the floor — and he scored from every conceivable way. He never sped up, never took a bad shot.
Katz: I hold one strong opinion about the 2025 NBA MVP — and it’s not about who I believe should win. With a quarter of the season to go, Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić are too close, a race reminiscent of the one from 2017, when Russell Westbrook and James Harden both posted historic stat lines.
Around this time that year, Harden was the presumed leader, despite Westbrook pacing to become the first player to average a triple-double in more than half a century. By mid-April, Westbrook had jumped him, not just because of gaudy box scores — both he and Harden posted a combination of points, rebounds and assists that had never before occurred in NBA history — but because of a slew of clutch performances over the final month of the schedule.
I don’t know for whom I will vote. All I can say now is that, while I’m thrilled to compare narratives to history, I won’t use history to influence my choice.
It doesn’t matter to me that the MVP used to go to the best player on the best team, nor do I care about how four MVPs in five years would affect Jokić’s all-time standing. It’s irrelevant that some MVPs of the past have been subpar defensive players, a defense used to support Jokić, who is a smart, handsy defender but isn’t at the level of Gilgeous-Alexander.
The NBA has evolved. Why can’t the voters do the same?
What I know is this is a one-season award. As I always have, I will vote for it in a vacuum. And come April, my vote could go to either of those two.
Vardon: I think I will vote for Gilgeous-Alexander, or is it Jokić, when the time comes.
I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about a player who’s gone from off my ballot to the top three.
There was a graphic on one of the national broadcasts recently which showed that LeBron James, at age 40, has averages of roughly 25 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, which were very close to the numbers he put up during his previous MVP season with the Miami Heat in 2012-13. At his age, with his mileage and even considering the extra basketball he played last summer in leading Team USA to Olympic gold, James is easily deserving of a legacy vote, where his name appears in the top five as a lifetime achievement nod or something. Except, James is doing this for the Lakers while leading them from the middle of the Western Conference to second place.
Yes, I realize a perennial MVP contender in Luka Dončić fell into his lap last month, but the Lakers’ resurgence began before the shocking trade, and James was in the middle of it. Almost inexplicably, James is trying on defense this season, and L.A. has benefited from that. He’s shooting nearly 40 percent from 3-point range and playing nearly 35 minutes per game. And with Anthony Davis gone, James has made his presence felt more on the interior and near the rim.
I thought when Dončić arrived and got settled, he, and not James, would be the Lakers’ best player. But that hasn’t quite been the case. With the Milwaukee Bucks floating in that 4-5 range and the Boston Celtics’ depth taking away from Jayson Tatum’s case, I think James’ production, plus the Lakers’ team performance, vaults him ahead of Tatum and Antetokounmpo. At least I did until he suffered a groin injury Saturday. Now, I want to see how the Lakers finish and how available James is down the stretch.
The Lakers have five back-to-backs remaining, and there is concern James could miss a chunk of time. All I am saying is, if the Lakers are in second place in the West at season’s end, and if James returns with enough time to see that through, he would be very high on my ballot.
(Top photo of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić: Joshua Gateley / Getty Images)
