Overcomplicating the MVP race eventually simplified it for me.
I tried thinking through all the angles, all the voting philosophies, all the precedents. The “best player on the best team” ideology. The “whose team would be worse without him” question. All the myriad ways you can disassemble the acronym and dissect it and define it, because the NBA doesn’t define it for us. Intentionally left up to interpretation, the MVP award allows each of the 100 voters to adopt their own method.
This is increasingly mine.
The most valuable player is the same thing as the best player. Nikola Jokic is the best player. He got my vote, which was due this week.
I struggle to delineate between the two superlatives, and every time I tried this season, I ended up running into a dead end. Early on, as it started to become clear that we were evaluating a two-horse race between Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, I considered both sides of the “team success” component.
Many Nuggets fans will have you know that Denver would be a Play-In team or worse without Jokic getting the most out of everyone who shares the court with him, whereas Oklahoma City was unambiguously a juggernaut this season because the defensive infrastructure surrounding SGA was bordering on indestructible. Jokic elevated the Nuggets from mediocre to good; Gilgeous-Alexander elevated the Thunder from good to great. Therefore, Jokic was more valuable. His team needed him more.
I found this to be a deeply flawed line of thinking. It essentially punishes Gilgeous-Alexander for having a better roster around him. Denver was 19.8 points per 100 possessions better with Jokic than without him. Oklahoma City was 11.5 points better with Shai on the floor. That’s still a resounding number, and maybe it would be even more so if Gilgeous-Alexander’s supporting cast was weaker. I couldn’t convince myself that a vote for Jokic on those grounds would be fair to SGA. He has no control over the fact that his team still produced a positive net rating when he was on the bench.
By the same token, how could I use team wins as the deciding factor in my vote? That would be punishing Jokic for having a worse roster around him than Gilgeous-Alexander, which feels equally unfair when the numbers and eye test show that Jokic impacts winning at an absurdly high level. He has no control over the fact that Denver’s net rating was worse than Utah’s and Charlotte’s when he was on the bench. The Thunder’s 68-win season was a remarkable feat. But for me to be consistent in my logic, I felt it was important to separate that from Shai’s individual greatness, undeniable though it still is.
A lot of thoughtful and experienced voters have pointed to those 68 wins as a tiebreaker of sorts, interpreting the MVP as a team prize and not merely an individual one. I’m in no place to tell those people they’re objectively wrong. As I’ve noted, the definition of “most valuable player” is left open-ended to make room for independent thought. But that means it’s on me to establish my own subjective standards. It has been a constantly evolving process. This is only my second year as an NBA awards voter.
The more philosophizing I’ve put toward all of it, the more convinced I’ve felt that if you’re the best player, you’re also the most valuable. It’s OK to strip this all the way down to its simplest form.
That’s why I haven’t had any discrepancies between my MVP ballot and First Team All-NBA ballot either year. And that’s why I settled on Jokic, who I think can fairly be labeled the consensus best basketball player on the planet. Even assuming he doesn’t receive the trophy this time, the historic regular season he just finished will only bolster that reputation.
“If he doesn’t win the MVP,” Nuggets interim coach David Adelman said last week, “it’s the greatest season of all time not to win MVP.”
And in fairness to Gilgeous-Alexander, I believe the same could be said for him if Jokic did end up winning the vote. SGA scored a hyper-efficient 33 points per game and will be a deserving winner in his own right. His stats contributed to Oklahoma City’s incredible overall success.
I just don’t believe team wins are necessarily the most accurate representation of how much a single player impacts winning.
Note: I revealed my full awards ballot on the latest episode of The Denver Post’s Nuggets Ink Podcast.