The Illusion of an MVP Race
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is having an all-time great season. It simply shouldn't matter.
If you were to have a glance at the NBA’s Western Conference standings, you’d find the Oklahoma City Thunder sat comfortably in first.
Their point guard - Shai Gilgeous-Alexander - leads the NBA in points per game, currently dropping in just over 32 points a night.
These facts alone can be the foundation of a Most Valuable Player Award case. The best player on the best team, scoring more than anyone else in the league.
But there’s more to SGA’s argument. The Thunder’s net rating is an elite 17.5 when Shai is on the floor. They’re floating around net zero when he’s off it. He contributes on both ends of the floor, sitting among the league leaders in steals. Here are a few more:
98th percentile for points per shot attempt
88th percentile for turnover rate despite his sky-high usage rate
1st in LEBRON, a metric evaluating a player’s contributions per 100 possessions
I could spend a long time pulling different statistics that tell you in a variety of different ways that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is having a fantastic season. What’s even more telling than any other stat, however, is SGA’s place on a very prestigious list.
I’m going to use Box Plus/Minus, known as BPM, to illustrate just how great SGA’s season has been.
Per Basketball Reference, BPM uses a player’s box score information, position, and the team’s overall performance to estimate the player’s contribution in points above the league average per 100 possessions played.
In other words, a player’s contribution to the team when he is on the court.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s current BPM for the 2024/25 season is 11.65. That is the fourteenth-best BPM score EVER. Shai’s performance this year has been so dominant that it ranks top 20 among every individual season by every player in the league’s entire 78-year history. That is special. That is unquestionably MVP-level production.
Until it isn’t.
Let’s go from the top of the list.
Best Single Season Box Plus/Minus Scores in NBA History
NOTE: 2024/25 numbers are as of January 30, 2025. Click this link to see exact up-to-date numbers.
Nikola Jokic - 14.23 (2024/25)
Nikola Jokic - 13.72 (2021/22)
LeBron James - 13.24 (2008/09)
Nikola Jokic - 13.23 (2023/24)
Nikola Jokic - 13.01 (2022/23)
Michael Jordan - 12.96 (1987/88)
Nikola Jokic - 12.09 (2020/21)
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander - 11.65 (2024/25)
Unfortunately for SGA, we are witnessing arguably the greatest peak of any individual player in the history of the NBA. Nikola Jokic is just too good at basketball.
The current narrative being pushed by mainstream media is that Jokic and Gilgeous-Alexander are in a neck-and-neck race for the MVP award. This shouldn’t be the case.
Voter fatigue has already plagued Nikola Jokic once before. When Joel Embiid won the award in 2022/23, the Serbian simply responded by winning the championship a few weeks later. And that championship re-emphasized what most already knew; that the regular season MVP award should’ve been Jokic’s for the third consecutive season.
Were SGA to win the award this time around, we’d be reliving a similar scenario. He’s great. Jokic is simply greater. Just because he’s won 3 of the last 4 MVPs doesn't make him any less deserving of winning the award again. He remains the best player in the league.
Jokic is the second-best 3-point shooter by percentage this season at 47.9%. That’s a better single-season mark than Steph Curry has ever achieved. It’s a ridiculous number. It’s one of many that Jokic produces that get little attention.
Last week he dropped in 35 points, 20 rebounds, and 15 assists, the first time such a statline has been achieved since Wilt Chamberlain. It was also casually his fifth-straight triple-double. And, by the way, no other player has even HALF as many triple-doubles as Jokic on the season.
He’s on pace to break his own record with the highest single-season player efficiency rating ever. I’m dropping that in amongst a list of facts like it isn’t a sentence worthy of its own story entirely.
His per-game production, an accumulation of all of his counting stats, is the highest on record since blocks and steals became official stats in 1973. This sport is just too easy for the horse-loving Serbian giant.
I’ll probably write about Jokic again soon because there’s a lot of intrigue surrounding the Denver Nuggets beyond their megastar.
But something that should be long-established is that he is the best player in the world. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is having an exceptional year on a brilliant team. But if he is to win an MVP award this season, he’ll have to do it in the NBA Finals.
That is, unless, the MVP voters get it unequivocally wrong. Which would be a shame. But then again, knowing Jokic, he probably wouldn’t care.