With one month left in the NBA’s 2024-25 regular season, we’re currently staring at an extraordinarily close MVP race between three-time winner Nikola Jokic and last year’s runner-up, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. It is a fascinating stylistic contrast. The world’s best player having his best season versus a generational bucket-getting guard who is leading the NBA in scoring on a dominant first-place team. Both lead aspiring, legitimate title contenders. Both are excellent in the clutch. Both bring it on each end every night and have humongous offensive responsibility. Now let’s compare them in the most respectful possible way!
Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging 32.7 points, 6.2 assists, and 5.1 rebounds per game. He ranks first in total points, free throws, estimated plus-minus, win shares, and drives (from which he’s tallied 237 more points than any other player!). He’s second in steals, second in usage rate, and 10th in true shooting percentage. The Oklahoma City Thunder have outscored opponents by 17.5 points per 100 possessions when SGA is on the court, which, naturally, leads the league. He’s as irrepressible from the perimeter as they come, whether dribbling off a ball screen or isolating from the top of the key. Think prime James Harden or Kobe Bryant, but hyperefficient while leading an absolute juggernaut.
The Thunder are built like an All-Defensive team, and, foundationally, their key to success is the aggressive way they parlay turnovers into easy buckets on the other end. They’re competitive without Shai, but with him they’re a clear favorite to come out of the Western Conference and, arguably, win the whole thing. Jalen Williams is his only All-Star teammate, and Chet Holmgren (possibly OKC’s second-most talented player) has played only 500 minutes all season. None of it matters. He’s still made over 50 percent of his long 2s and has scored at least 40 points 11 times and at least 50 points four times. It’s an A-plus campaign that deserves strong MVP consideration, and he would be a lock to win the award 99 out of 100 times. But, this year, Jokic represents that exception.
At the risk of overheating my laptop’s operating system, let’s start with some counting numbers. Jokic is averaging 28.9 points, 13 rebounds, and 10.5 assists per game, which translates to third overall in scoring and rebounding and second in assists. He has 29 triple-doubles (which is one more than the next three players combined on the league’s leaderboard) and recently posted the first 30/20/20 game in NBA history.
Jokic is second in points in the paint, sixth in true shooting, fourth in 3-point percentage among all players who’ve taken at least 250 attempts, and third in steals (trailing only SGA and Dyson Daniels). Most catchall metrics still place him above everyone else, and his fingerprints are all over a Denver Nuggets offense that generates 125.6 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the court (first out of 290 players who’ve appeared in at least 40 games). Not only is he first in touches, but he also averages 11 more than anyone else, which is the same gap that sits between second and 12th place. Jokic attacks from more angles, out of more actions, than any other player, whether he’s surveying from the elbow, rolling to the pocket, tipping in someone else’s missed shot, drawing two defenders in the post, spotting up behind the arc, or pushing it up the court by himself.
The Nuggets are plus-507 with Jokic on the court and minus-206 when he sits. That gap is mind-boggling. When you translate his point differential into an estimation of his impact on Denver’s record, the Nuggets would project to win 50 more games with Jokic than without. It’s an untouchable number. (SGA is currently plus-18 wins, on a team that still outscores its opponent when he’s off the court.)
For the 10th straight year, none of Jokic’s supporting cast was selected for the All-Star team, and so much of his MVP case revolves around the innumerable ways he makes everyone around him better. This is the smartest player alive, and he’s among the least selfish superstars in history. I feel like a broken record writing this, but his approach to the sport transcends individual statistics. Consider this: The NBA’s leader in total fast-break points this season is not Giannis Antetokounmpo or LeBron James. It’s Christian Braun!
This isn’t an attempt to discredit Braun’s talent, but he would not be doing this on a different team, with a center who doesn’t think about throwing half-court outlet passes before he even secures a defensive rebound.
There are a few other candidates to win MVP—Jayson Tatum, Antetokounmpo, and Donovan Mitchell will likely round out the top five—but nobody is touching Jokic and SGA at one and two. For me, the fact that we’ve seen Gilgeous-Alexander’s level of production from other great guards before puts him an eyelash below the Joker, whose season has zero historical precedent. —Michael Pina
The Ringer’s MVP Votes (With One Month Left)
With just one month remaining in the regular season, we asked the entire Ringer NBA team to give us their MVP votes and back up their logic. (Spoiler alert: The results will surprise our readers in Oklahoma City!)
Pina: Nikola Jokic. [Gestures above.]
Howard Beck: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. I feel obligated to preface this answer with my usual TED Talk: The MVP is not the player with the most awesome stats or the most historic stats or the slickest on-off differential or the spiffiest all-in-one advanced metrics. Sure, all that factors in. But this isn’t and never has been a purely statistical exercise. If it were, we could dispense with voting and just ask Siri to give us the answer.
This award has always been a blend of art and science, stats and judgment, and—most critically—player excellence and team success. Winning has always mattered, and it should. And winning at a very high rate has (with a few exceptions) mattered greatly for the past 40 years. You can probably see where I’m going with this.
If we had to vote today, I’d choose Gilgeous-Alexander over Jokic. Both have been absolutely dominant individually, and both are anchoring teams that have a real chance to win it all. You can slice and dice and contextualize their stats in a zillion ways that might benefit one or the other.
But ultimately, I think the MVP is about the importance of those stats—that is, what did all that production accomplish? Gilgeous-Alexander’s team is on pace for 67 wins and could flirt with 70. OKC is by far the best team in the West, with a net rating (12.4) that dwarfs Denver’s (4.9). And Gilgeous-Alexander is the primary reason why.
More on the MVP Race
Danny Chau: Nikola Jokic (with a heavy heart). SGA is my favorite player in the NBA, by far. I adore and respect him for all the reasons he draws ire. He will be remembered as one of the greatest scorers ever, and he’s playing on a team that’s more than 10 games ahead of second place in the Western Conference. He deserves to win the award, and it seems likely that he will. But Jokic is having the greatest statistical season in modern basketball history. If there were a clean way to adjust for both level of overall competition and the difficulty of Jokic’s shot diet, he wouldn’t pale in comparison with Wilt Chamberlain’s best seasons, either. You can't argue that the stats are hollow. The numbers and eye test register the same reality: Jokic is Denver’s entire central nervous system.
Placing Jokic in a tie with Wilt and LeBron for fourth-most MVP awards in NBA history is not something to be done lightly—and neither is denying Shai’s ironclad single-season résumé on a dominant contender. The MVP winner hasn’t gone on to win a championship in the same season in nearly a decade. There’s a chance that both Jokic and SGA will get to make their mark on the season’s epitaph when it’s all said and done.
Kirk Goldsberry: Nikola Jokic. Michael Malone’s quote last night captures my logic. If you didn’t know Jokic had won three of the past four MVPs, and you looked at the cases for an anonymous Player A vs. Player B, you would probably end up choosing Jokic. I do not believe that our MVP votes should be affected by things like “Well, he’s won it already” or “He’s never won it.” The annual award is clearly designed to reward that regular season’s most valuable performance, and for my money, Jokic’s work this year represents one of the single most valuable performances I’ve ever seen in pro basketball.
Wosny Lambre: Nikola Jokic. Gilgeous-Alexander is having an all-time great NBA season. A season that I would rank near the top of any list of the top individual performances of the past 15 years. However, the notion that SGA should be some kind of runaway favorite is utterly preposterous. Heck, I even find the notion that he is the front-runner to be quite strange, given the existence of our Serbian king Nikola Jokic.
There simply is no empirical case for SGA in this race. He far surpasses Jokic in usage rate, but that’s pretty much it. Jokic is the far more efficient scorer. He’s beating SGA in assist percentage and rebound rate (let’s be honest, this is an offensive award), and he’s ahead in offensive rating and just about every single player impact metric you can imagine.
(I can already hear the angry chorus of WINZZZZZZZ disciples hysterically foaming at the mouth, belting, “WINS ARE AN EMPIRICAL DATA POINT!” in reference to the distance between OKC and Denver in the standings. But Jokic is still the King, y’all.)
Justin Verrier: Nikola Jokic. I’m withholding final judgments until we see the remaining games—the race is that close—but I’m struggling to square the logical dissonance of rewarding Jokic’s across-the-board impact three times … and then giving the award to someone else when he’s had, far and away, his best season to date. It’s more than the career-high production, too: Jokic is doing more because his team needs him to. The Nuggets were bereft of 3-point shooters earlier this season, so Jokic stepped up, transforming from a league-average perimeter threat (35 percent over his first nine seasons) to one of the best in the game (43 percent). Denver needed depth, so he breathed life back into Russell Westbrook’s career, turning the abrasive former MVP into a valuable rotation player yet again. The Thunder have had a historic regular season, and SGA deserves boatloads of credit for helping to power those results, but Jokic is having a historic individual season—and that’s what we reward with the MVP award.
Logan Murdock: Nikola Jokic. The logical choice here is Shai. He’s the face of the best team in the league, has numbers comparable to prime Harden’s and Jordan’s, and has put the Thunder in pole position for a title, nearly 15 years after Harden, Westbrook, and Durant positioned the franchise to do the same.
But when I look back on the 2024-25 season, I'm going to think about the brilliance of Jokic, who possesses stats and signature games similar to SGA’s (the man put up a 30/20/20 game in non-2K reality, for crying out loud). He’s dragging the chronically undermanned Nuggets to a top-five finish in the West—an incredible feat considering the team doesn’t have another All-Star and Jamal Murray was MIA for the first two months of the season.
Voters tend to reward players who’ve either won their conference or were decently close. Notable exceptions include Westbrook in 2017, after he became just the second player to average a triple-double (Jokic would be the third); Jordan in 1988, the year he also won Defensive Player of the Year; and Moses Malone in 1982, even though his team won just 46 games. After a season like this, Jokic’s exceptional output deserves the same outlier treatment.
Isaac Levy-Rubinett: Nikola Jokic. If Jokic doesn’t win MVP, it won’t be the first time the best player in the world didn’t take home the award. If that were the only criterion, LeBron James would have double-digit trophies by now. But when the greatest player on earth is in the middle of his greatest season, it’s hard to come up with reasons not to reward him. Jokic has been the best player in the NBA this season—full stop. He’s near the top of almost every statistical category, dragging a thin, imperfect roster to a top-three seed in a brutal conference. He possesses that rare, ineffable quality that galvanizes and elevates everyone around him, not just through the passes he makes but also through his selfless mien—which, counterintuitively, has him taking more shots this season to prop up an offense starved for shooting. SGA has done everything humanly possible to take the MVP from Jokic. Somehow, it just hasn’t been enough.
Matt Dollinger: Nikola Jokic. It’s tough to snub someone who hasn’t blinked all season. Shai has scored at least 25 points in 56 of his 63 games. He’s scored at least 40 points 12 times and scored under 20 points only once (18 in a win). Meanwhile, his team has lost back-to-back games only once, and that was back in November. But there’s really no debate about which player is the most valuable this season. Oklahoma City’s roster is built like a palace. Denver’s is built like a renovated Airbnb. Shai is the crown jewel of OKC’s luxury build, but the place would still be pretty nice without him. Jokic is Denver’s entire physical structure, plus the plumbing, the electric, the HVAC, the furniture, and the cable. There are no Nuggets without him. If these two teams played in a series, there would be no debate about the best player on the floor. We’re witnessing an all-time great.
Rob Mahoney: Nikola Jokic. Call me crazy, but I think the best player in the world having a season worthy of that title should probably win the MVP. It’s a tremendous credit to Shai that there’s even a debate. Both candidates are forcing opponents into increasingly desperate coverages. But where SGA manages to knife through all that pressure, Jokic transcends it. He exploits double-teams and triple-teams and zoned-up looks faster and more consistently than anyone—which is to say he’s the best at solving the fundamental puzzles of the sport. Jokic doesn’t just dominate. He cracks a game open.
Final votes [gasps]: Jokic 9, Gilgeous-Alexander 1
