One head-to-head result in early March does not, by itself, decide something as massive as which player will wind up winning the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award. It can, however, provide an opportunity to make an emphatic statement. Like, for example, capping your league-leading 11th 40-point game of the season with a late-fourth-quarter run to help turn a tight game into yet another blowout win.
Plenty of pundits seized the opportunity on Sunday to argue that the Thunder’s marquee matinee win over the Nuggets all but secured the first MVP trophy of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s career. And if Nikola Jokić returns serve on Monday night, when Oklahoma City and Denver play the second half of their two-game set, with a monster game leading to a Nuggets win, chances are that many of those same pundits will seize the opportunity to swing the other way — or, at least, declare the MVP race Up in the Air and Too Close to Call.
To some extent, that’s just the nature of contemporary commentary. For the most part, though, it’s also the natural outgrowth of two unbelievable players having two unbelievable seasons and, in the process, constructing two damn good cases for why they should wind up hoisting the award come season’s end.
The case for Gilgeous-Alexander
Gilgeous-Alexander’s case opens with a time-honored, easy-to-grasp handle: The Best Player on the Best Team. Which — with apologies to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who enter Monday’s action on their second 14-game winning streak of the season, and with an NBA-best record of 54-10 — is what the Thunder have been since the season tipped off in October.
Oklahoma City sits at 53-11, ranking top-four on both ends of the court, with the league’s best efficiency differential, the highest era-adjusted net rating of any team since the 1996 Bulls, and the largest average margin of victory in NBA history. Gilgeous-Alexander leads the way, averaging a league-leading 32.9 points, 5.1 rebounds, 6.2 assists and 1.8 steals per game, shooting 52.5% from the field, 37.2% from 3-point range and 89.9% from the free-throw line — good for a true shooting percentage of 64.3%. The only other players to put up numbers like that? Michael Jordan and James Harden.
Everything Oklahoma City has built flows outward from Gilgeous-Alexander, the league’s premier source of dribble penetration for five years running. His ability to get wherever he wants on the court whenever he wants, to get all the way to the cup and finish at a high percentage, to stop on a dime and rain fire from the midrange, or to spray the ball out to a teammate waiting to capitalize on the advantage he’s created, has made SGA arguably the game’s best scorer.
It’s also made him one of the league’s most effective engines of efficient offense overall. The Thunder are scoring 1.11 points per possession featuring an SGA pick-and-roll, 1.08 points per possession featuring an SGA isolation and 1.13 points per possession featuring an SGA post-up, according to Synergy — all top-10 marks among high-volume players. With Gilgeous-Alexander on the court this season, Oklahoma City is averaging 123.7 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass — a tick south of the Cavs’ league-best full-season mark — while turning the ball over on just 11.1% of their offensive plays, the lowest rate in the league.
All told, the Thunder are blowing opponents’ doors off by an obscene 16.8 points-per-100 in SGA’s minutes, thanks partly to their historically elite defense — a unit on which Gilgeous-Alexander dutifully plays his role. He rarely matches up with opponents’ most dangerous perimeter players, thanks to the armada of excellent stoppers (Luguentz Dort, Jalen Williams, Alex Caruso, Cason Wallace) at head coach Mark Daigneault’s disposal. He does his job, though, ranking second in the NBA in steals and 11th in deflections, holding opponents to 43.2% shooting (a top-20 mark among players to contest at least 500 shots) and grading out well as a help defender and passing lane disruptor, according to The BBall Index’s game charting.
There’s not really a great argument against SGA’s case. It’s just that there’s also a pretty unassailable case for the guy who’s won three of the last four MVP trophies.
The case for Jokić
Jokić is on pace to be the third player ever to average a triple-double for a full season, scoring a career-high 28.8 points per game to go with 12.9 rebounds, 10.5 assists and 1.8 steals a night. He’s doing it on dramatically higher efficiency than either Oscar Robertson or Russell Westbrook: 57.4% from the field, a career-high 43% from 3-point land and 80.6% at the foul line, tallying up to a 66% true shooting percentage.
Only two other players in NBA history (minimum 50 games played) have scored this much this efficiently: unanimous MVP Stephen Curry and 1988 Charles Barkley. Which, weirdly, feels like a pretty fun approximation of what Jokić has become offensively — but stretched out to 6-foot-11 and also as maybe the best passer in the world.
Only Trae Young has created more points via assist than Jokić this season. When you add those to the points he scores himself and the ones he opens up for teammates with his screening, Jokić is generating a gargantuan 66.1 points per 36 minutes of floor time, using the Points Created metric cooked up by Zach Kram, now of ESPN — 14 more per-36 than SGA.
Jokić is shouldering such a sizable offensive burden — first in the NBA in total touches and front-court touches per game by a mile — largely because Denver really, really needs him to do it.
With Jamal Murray struggling for the first 20 or so games before turning it on in early December, with Aaron Gordon (who left Sunday’s game early with right calf tightness) missing more than 40% of the season with various leg injuries, and with nobody else save the rejuvenated Russell Westbrook able to offer much in the way of consistent shot creation, the Nuggets have gone from scoring a scorching 128.4 points-per-100 with Jokić on the court to a dismal 103.8 points-per-100 with him off of it. In all, Denver’s been a whopping 23.6 points-per-100 better in the big fella’s floor time — the largest on-court/of-court split of any player in the NBA to log at least 1,000 minutes … and more than double SGA’s on-off splits (plus-11.3).
Even amid all the injuries and inconsistencies, Denver has the NBA’s second-best offense and a top-five net rating, is on pace for 53 wins, and is projected to finish with the No. 2 seed. And while you could make the argument that the Thunder’s success stems at least as much from that historic defense as it does from SGA’s wizardry with the ball, you really can’t place the lion’s share of the credit for the Nuggets’ success anywhere but in Jokić’s capable hands.
The MVP race isn’t over
That makes for an awfully close race — one that a look at the advanced statistics doesn’t exactly clarify, since Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić sit first and second in just about every alphabet-soup number that NBA nerds have devised.
SGA holds the edge in estimated plus-minus and EPM wins, LEBRON and LEBRON wins above replacement, win shares and win shares per 48 minutes, and the estimated version of FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR and RAPTOR wins above replacement. Jokić, in turn, takes value over replacement player, player efficiency rating, box plus-minus, Opta’s DRIP, Kostya Medvedovsky’s DARKO daily plus-minus, ESPN’s Net Points Per 100 Possessions and Net Points wins above replacement, and Jeremias Engelmann’s xRAPM.
It’s funny: Despite their broadly demonstrated ability to establish total control over just about every game they play in, it’d be reasonable to say that, with just over a month to go, neither Gilgeous-Alexander nor Jokić has laid inarguable claim to MVP honors. Monday presents another opportunity for them both to do so, because while one head-to-head result in early March doesn’t decide anything in and of itself, it can leave a lasting impression in the minds of the media voters who’ll be filling out their ballots in April.
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