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Jokic Joins Elite Company With Third NBA MVP Award

lev akabas
·2 min read
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Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic was voted the 2023-24 NBA Most Valuable Player, giving him his third MVP in four years. The honor places him in elite company alongside only eight other players in league history who have won the award three times: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Moses Malone.

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Jokic averaged 26.4 points, 9.0 assists and 12.4 rebounds per game in the 2023-24 season. The 29-year-old finished top five in the NBA in totals for those three categories, becoming the first player to accomplish that since Chamberlain in the 1960s. Jokic also finished top 10 in steals.

Given the above figures, it’s no surprise that Jokic also led the league in Box Plus/Minus (BPM), an all-in-one player metric based solely on box score statistics. The NBA leader in BPM has won the MVP in 13 of the past 16 seasons, with Joel Embiid’s win over Jokic last year being one of the few exceptions. That’s a shift from earlier eras of NBA history, when that advanced stat would have predicted fewer than half of MVP winners.

Denver outscored opponents by 12.6 points per 100 possessions this season with Jokic in the game, but were outscored by 11.1 points per 100 possessions with Jokic on the bench. That difference of 23.7 is the largest for any player who played at least 1,000 minutes, according to Cleaning the Glass. Jokic has led the league in that metric each of the past three seasons.

The Serb’s third win means that the past six MVPs have gone to international players, versus just four in NBA history prior to 2018. This year, the three finalists were all born outside of the United States.

Jokic’s Nuggets trail the Minnesota Timberwolves 0-2 in the second round after dropping Games 1 and 2 at home. If they lose the series, it will be the fifth straight season that the league’s MVP did not advance to the conference finals, after that happened just five times in the previous 29 seasons.

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