MVP Prestige: Jokic Joins Elite Company With Third NBA MVP Award due to…

Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets won the 2023–24 NBA Most Valuable Player vote, making it his third MVP in the previous four years. With this distinction, he joins an elite group of just eight players in league history who have won the award three times: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, and Moses Malone.

In the 2023–24 season, Jokic averaged 26.4 points, 9.0 assists, and 12.4 rebounds per game. The 29-year-old became the first player to do so since Chamberlain in the 1960s when he ended in the top five in the NBA in totals for those three categories. Jokic was among the top 10 in thefts as well.

It should come as no surprise, considering the numbers above, that Jokic also topped the league in Box Plus/Minus (BPM), an all-in-one player metric that is based only on box score data. With Joel Embiid’s victory against Jokic last year being one of the rare exceptions, the NBA’s top scorer in terms of BPM has earned MVP in 13 of the previous 16 seasons. Comparing that to previous periods in NBA history, same advanced statistic would have predicted less than half of MVP winners.

This season, Denver outscored opponents by 12.6 points per 100 possessions when Jokic was playing, but when he was not, they were outscored by 11.1 points per 100 possessions. Cleaning the Glass states that this 23.7 disparity is the biggest for any player who played at least 1,000 minutes.

For the previous three seasons, Jokic has topped the league in that particular measure. With the Serb’s third victory, foreign players have won six MVPs in the last six years, compared to just four in NBA history before 2018. The top four vote-getters this year were all non-American citizens.

After losing Games 1 and 2 at home, Jokic’s Nuggets are already behind the Minnesota Timberwolves 0-2 in the second round. If they lose the series, the league MVP will not have made it to the conference finals for the sixth consecutive season; this has only happened five times in the previous 29 seasons.