I’m not saying Nikola Jokic will win MVP.
I’m not even saying Jokic should be favored to win. After all, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is having an MVP-worthy season. SGA is leading the NBA in scoring and second in steals while leading the team with the best record in the Western Conference. That’s legit.
What I am saying, is that if you are going to make a bet on NBA MVP at this point in the season, betting on Jokic for MVP is the only option that makes sense.
According to ESPN BET, Gilgeous-Alexander is -700 to win MVP while Jokic is +400. Those are “done deal” odds, with SGA as the runway favorite to win. Odds of -700 mean that one would have to bet seven units to win one. There is no upside to making a bet with odds that short, with little return on investment for a bet that won’t be paid out for almost two months. Meanwhile, +400 is great value for a player with a legitimate chance to win.
So the question we need to ask is; does Jokic still have a legitimate chance to win? Let’s explore.
Three MVPs in four seasons: NBA historic royalty
Jokic has been the best player in the league for the past five seasons by a significant margin. In the four seasons prior to this one, these have been Jokic’s finishes in the MVP vote:
2020-21: Jokic first (91 first place votes), Joel Embiid second (one first place vote) 2021-22: Jokic first (65 first place votes), Embiid second (26 first place votes) 2022-23: Embiid first (73 first place votes), Jokic second (15 first place votes)
2023-24: Jokic first (79 first place votes), Gilgeous-Alexander second (15 first place votes)
Jokic joins Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and LeBron James as the only players in NBA history to win three MVP awards in any four-season span. Michael Jordan, for whom the MVP trophy is named, won three MVPs in a five-season span broken up by two of Magic’s MVPs.
If Jokic were to win again this season, he would join Russell and LeBron as the only players to win four MVPs in five seasons. Historic stuff.
Box score magic: rarefied air
Speaking of historic, Jokic is on pace this season to become the first center and only the third player in NBA history to average a triple-double for an entire season. Jokic enters Friday with averages of 28.8 PPG, 12.8 RPG and 10.4 APG. Oscar Robertson (once) and Russell Westbrook (four times) are the only players to have achieved this, and the first time Westbrook did it (2016-17) he won the MVP on a 47-win Thunder squad that finished sixth in the Western Conference.
Jokic is currently third in the NBA in points per game, third in rebounds per game and second in assists per game. He is on-pace to become the only player in NBA history to finish in the top 3 in all three categories.
Jokic is also fourth overall (really a rounded tie for second) with 1.8 steals per game. He is on pace to become the only player in NBA history to finish in the top4 in four of the five major box score categories (points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game).
MVP-caliber impact
The basis of the “best player on best team is the MVP” argument is the assumption that by leading his team to the best record, the player is making the biggest impact on winning in the league. But, as NBA analysis has gotten more sophisticated, we have other tools to measure impact besides just looking at team results. We can actually isolate, with a solid degree of accuracy, how much an individual player is contributing to his team’s wins.
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A new approach for this was just released this week by my colleague Dean Oliver, one of the godfathers of NBA analytics. Oliver introduced Net Points, an all-encompassing metric that uses play-by-play data to evaluate a player’s performance. According to Oliver, Net Points “quantifies every rebound, shot, turnover and free throw and assigns credit and blame to the players on the court. It divides credit and blame based on the difficulty of the players’ contributions to the success or failure o the team.”
Per the Net Points analysis page, Gilgeous-Alexander ranks second in the NBA in both offensive (+317.8 offensive Net Points) and overall (+355.4 Net Points) impact. But Jokic ranks first in the NBA in both (+362.7 offensive Net Points, +423.4 overall Net Points).
A different way of estimating player impact is with the family of plus/minus stats that track how a team does with a player on the court versus how they do with him off. According to basketball-reference.com, the Thunder are 15.8 points better per 100 possessions with SGA on the court than when he is on the bench. An elite mark. But again, Jokic is better. The Nuggets are a full 20.0 points better per 100 possessions with Jokic on the court than when he is on the bench, and when he is on the bench the Thunder are outscored by 8.6 points per 100 possessions.
Bottom line
Again, I’m not saying Jokic is going to win the MVP this season. Gilgeous-Alexander seems to have the wind at his back; he’s putting elite stats on the board for one of the best teams in the league.
With that said, Jokic is turning in a season that historically wins MVP awards. Even though he already has a four-season stretch of MVP excellence that includes him among the extremely short list of greatest players in NBA history, Jokic is very arguably turning in his best campaign to date.
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Jokic’s dominance as measured in the box scores is singular. Again, the only modern player in the post-merger NBA to average a triple-double on the season (Westbrook) also went on to win the MVP that season even on a 47-win sixth-seeded team. Jokic is turning in his MVP season on a team in a virtual tie for the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference.
No center has ever averaged a triple-double.
No player has ever finished top-3 in each of points, assists and rebounds per game.
No player has ever finished top-4 in any four of points, assists, rebounds, steals and blocks per game.
And Jokic leads the NBA, over SGA, in estimated impact on his team’s wins by both a box score method (Net Points) and a completely non-box score method (on-off +/-).
And that’s why, all things considered, if you are going to make a bet on NBA MVP at this point of the season, there is only one bet that has any practical value, and that is on Nikola Jokic to win.
