Nikola Jokic was the Obvious Choice for MVP, and the Reaction is Ridiculous
The NBA's MVP vote for 2021-22 wasn't close. And that's an accurate reflection of the race itself.
Nikola Jokic is the 2021-22 NBA MVP. After winning it last season, he's just the 13th player in league history to go back-to-back. And by securing 875 of a possible 1,000 voting points, he’s jumped all the way up to 26th on the all-time leaderboard for MVP Shares.
Despite public outcry (somehow mostly from the Northeastern United States) that began long before the official announcement, Jokic tallied 65 first-place votes. That’s almost double the combined total of Joel Embiid (26) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (9).
It wasn’t close. Nor should it have been (more on that later). But the reaction hit a fever pitch shortly after ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski broke the news on May 9. And it stayed there through the league’s official announcement on TNT two days later.
I won’t burden this particular post with all the hysteria that made its way to TV and the internet, but you can find a lot of it in the Twitter thread below (click the link for a wave of uninformed overreactions, at your own peril):
Some snippets from that capture the general tone and tenor of an anti-Jokic brigade that mobilized well in advance of the news.
“[Jokic] is not a back-to-back MVP. Just like Steve Nash wasn’t a back-to-back MVP,” former NBA player Stephen Jackson said of two people who are, in fact, back-to-back MVPs. “And these are just facts, man. It's other players who having great years, career years, who teams have a chance to win the championship. And if you know the game, you know Denver did not have a chance to win the championship.”
Notice how Jackson provided no real evidence, at all, to suggest that Jokic shouldn’t have won? There’s no defined criteria for “Most Valuable Player” beyond what’s in the title. And that’s a good thing. For well over half a century, it’s worked.
For all he knows, some voters did use (or at least flirted with) his criteria (career year for a title contender). How else would Devin Booker finish fourth? His numbers are nowhere near those of the top three.
And if the underlying implication is that the MVP should play winning basketball, how does Jackson, or any of those parroting the same talking points, explain the individual point differentials of the top three in voting?
Jokic: +9.0 points per 100 possessions (around that of a 62-win team)
Antetokounmpo: +8.1
Embiid: +7.9
Is Jokic supposed to be punished because his supporting cast (which was missing Jamal Murray for the entire season and Michael Porter Jr. for all but nine games) didn’t play as well as those of Embiid and Giannis?
Should MVP mean, “legitimate candidate who had the best supporting cast?” Really?
Milwaukee and Philadelphia having three more wins than Denver is the only half-baked argument that makes a lick of sense, and it implodes in the face of those numbers.
Maybe that’s why Fox Sports’ Nick Wright, who’s made it his personal mission to concoct nonsense out of thin air every time he talks about Jokic, didn’t even attempt to invoke that argument.
There isn’t a hint of objectivity there. Not even a whiff. "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong."
Wright apparently imagined that people are out there declaring Jokic is a better defender than Embiid or Giannis. Good luck finding an MVP voter who actually made that case. He said Luka Doncic had a greater impact on the game than Jokic this season (because he’s still playing?). Good luck finding any number that suggests that.
The MVP, a regular season award, is supposed to be discredited because the winner played without his top two co-stars and lost to a healthy multi-time champion in the playoffs?
Any time I see one of these rants (and Wright isn’t the only peddler), I can’t help but think they don’t actually believe what they’re saying. When Wright hands the baton off to Antoine Walker in that segment, his acting suggests he doesn’t. But he’s backed himself into a corner with an unsupportable position. And when you’re a cable TV talking head, there’s no apologizing and asking out of that corner.
Crusading (or air punching) against objectivity and evidence is the only option. And with Jokic, there’s a lot to crusade against.
The idea that his MVP case is built entirely on nebulous, undefined boogiemen known as “advanced numbers” is another figment of the opposition’s increasingly unhinged imagination, but we’ll start there anyway.
Jokic just broke the record for single-season box plus/minus (BPM is “…a basketball box score-based metric that estimates a basketball player’s contribution to the team when that player is on the court,” according to Basketball Reference). His 2020-21 BPM ranks fourth all time.
The number has its detractors (especially after the last two seasons), but it’s tracked back to 1973-74, and over half the MVP winners since then finished first in BPM (and 45 of the 49 winners finished in the top seven).
Other catch-all metrics endeavor to measure similar things. And Jokic dominated most of them.
You can have a problem with one or the other (or frankly, all of them), but when nearly the entire list points to the same guy, they might be onto something.
Basing the entire argument on those catch-alls does Jokic a disservice, though. Much of the NBA fanbase is still like the old-school scouts from Moneyball who like their basic numbers and personal eye tests (even if know one else would put a bit of stock in those eye tests). So let’s look at some of those.
In just 33.5 minutes per game, Jokic averaged 27.1 points, 13.8 rebounds, 7.9 assists, 1.5 steals, 1.3 threes and 0.9 blocks per game, while shooting 58.3 percent from the field.
It was the first season in NBA history with averages of at least 27 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists, and it brought his career marks for those three numbers to a level matched only by Larry Bird.
Jokic also just had the first season in NBA history with at least 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists. He now has his own club, and the only other players in league history with 1,900-point, 900-rebound, 400-assist seasons are Oscar Robertson, Kevin Garnett, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
There are only two campaigns in which Jokic’s 2021-22 marks for points per game (27.1) and true shooting percentage (66.1) were both eclipsed: Stephen Curry in 2015-16 and Charles Barkley in 1987-88.
Between he, Giannis and Embiid, Jokic led in field-goal percentage, two-point percentage, effective field-goal percentage, offensive rebounds per game, defensive rebounds per game, assists per game and steals per game. When you combine points with points generated by assist, Jokic leads there too. And, as noted above, he has the best plus-minus per 100 possessions (not an advanced stat) of the three.
Giannis and Embiid combined to score 131.6 more points than an exactly average shooter would have on their field-goal attempts (125.1 of that comes from Giannis). Jokic scored 230.9 more points than an exactly average shooter would have on his shots (first in the league by nearly 50 points).
There’s a reason Jokic’s advanced stats are so good.
And this notion that he somehow doesn’t pass the eye test is absurd. As Basketball News’ Nekias Duncan noted, “using the eye test as a point *against* Jokic is a creative way to tell on yourself lol”
With the possible exception of a first ballot Hall of Fame point guard like Chris Paul, no one in the league manipulates defenses with his vision, fakes and passing more than Jokic. His footwork everywhere on the floor, but particularly in the post, is all-time good. He’s a great space occupier on defense, much like Marc Gasol was in his prime. And his quick hands are part of why he’s tied for 10th all time among players his height (6’11”) or taller in career steal percentage.
Jokic’s touch as a shooter out to 20 feet is as feathery as anyone’s in the game. Stathead’s Shot Finder tracks back to 1996-97, and among players with at least 1,000 attempts, Jokic’s 52.7 field-goal percentage on twos from beyond four feet ranks first. The distance between his mark and second place is the same as the distance between second and 57th (the distance between Jokic’s mark and Dirk Nowitzki’s is over six points).
He can “curve the bullet” on cross-court passes like James McAvoy in Wanted. His repertoire of dishes includes no-looks, behind-the-backs, over-the-heads and everything in between. And his accuracy on all of the above is unparalleled.
Anyone who actually watches Jokic play can see what the legendary Gregg Popovich saw and relayed to reporters back in October.
“He’s like a seven-foot Larry Bird type guy, you know?” Pop asked rhetorically. “The way he can pass and the way he reads things, he’s incredible.”
There’s a back-to-back MVP in the NBA who’s on track for pantheon-level individual numbers (he currently trails only Michael Jordan in career BPM) and plays with a style like one of the 5-10 greatest of all time.
And instead of appreciating his game and evaluating him honestly, many have chosen to hysterically question whether the voters got this right.
They did. Unquestionably.