Nikola Jokić Is Losing the NBA MVP Race — But Probably Not Because of Voter Fatigue
If anything, Jokić's past award wins might be helping him, not hurting.
By the numbers, the 2024-25 NBA Most Valuable Player race is still very much an active two-man battle between Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver’s Nikola Jokić. For instance, here is my Estimated RAPTOR WAR leaderboard, showing a mere 0.5-win gap between SGA and the Joker in a fight that was roughly tied as recently as a week or so ago (before Jokić recently missed a few games due to injury):
However, the betting markets seem to have concluded that the award all but belongs to Gilgeous-Alexander already. Here are the implied odds via FanDuel, after removing the vig:
There’s certainly a case for either to win, and no real “wrong” answer between either SGA or Jokić, which makes the lopsidedness of these odds somewhat puzzling. My natural impulse — and I’m not alone in this — is to blame voter fatigue, as Jokić is the defending MVP and has won three of the previous four awards. Surely the NBA cognoscenti’s bias against rewarding the same guy over and over (and a hesitation to elevate Jokić into a four-MVP club that not even Magic Johnson nor Larry Bird belong to) is being held against the Joker here. Right?
Off the top of my head, I can think of multiple instances of voter fatigue hurting a player’s MVP candidacy, including Wilt Chamberlain in 1969, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1973, Michael Jordan in 1993 (and again in 1997), and LeBron James in 2011. But I wanted to actually test what the statistical effect of voter fatigue on the NBA MVP is — and the results, frankly, surprised me.
First, here’s what I did. For each NBA MVP candidate since the 1979-80 season, I gathered:
Their Estimated RAPTOR WAR per 82 team games
Their team’s winning percentage1
The year-over-year change in their team’s winning percentage
How many previous MVPs they had won
Whether or not they were actively the defending MVP that season
I ran all of these variables through a logistic regression — the dependent variable being whether the player won MVP (1) or not (0) — to isolate the effect of potential MVP fatigue (either from total previous wins or being the defending winner) after controlling for performance and team factors. And the result was that having more prior MVPs and/or being the defending MVP made a player more likely to win the MVP, not less.
For instance, let’s plug the other particulars of Jokić’s season — 18.1 WAR per 82 team games, a 63.8% team winning percentage and a -5.7% change in winning percentage year-over-year — into our regression formula, while changing the variables for the player’s previous MVP wins:
All else being equal in terms of individual and team performance, a player who won the MVP before — and especially is the defending winner — has a significantly better chance to win again than an equivalent star who isn’t gunning for another MVP. Granted, the effect is much smaller than those belonging to the two true pillars of an MVP candidacy: player production and team winning percentage. But after standardizing each variable, the additive influence of being a defending winner is roughly as important for predicting MVPs as the year-over-year change in winning percentage for the player’s team.
And this finding holds true even when we try to account for stylistic factors that voters may prefer beyond their baseline weight toward WAR.
If we add variables for points per 36 possessions, assist rate, rebound rate and Defensive RAPTOR — all of which help capture any potential bias against particular playing styles within a player’s WAR profile — we do find that big scorers and rebounders tend to win MVP slightly more than passers, and far more than players whose value is tied up more in defense. This also reduces the relative value of winning previous MVPs by a bit, suggesting that the types of players who win multiple MVPs have characteristics that are valued more by voters than we would expect based on WAR alone.
But the positive effect of prior wins still persists — especially the advantage of being a defending winner. And remember, these results are not just a reflection of better players being more likely to repeat, because we control for player performance (WAR/82) and team success. The advantage exists beyond what we would expect based on performance alone.
I was so surprised by this that I had to double-check the data in another way. I gathered up the entire list of 42 MVP candidates who were defending winners, and created a control group from non-defending winners — resampled to be proportional to the first group in terms of WAR/82 and team winning percentage.2 The group of defending MVPs won again 28.6 percent of the time, while the comparison group only won 24.4 percent of the time — again supporting the idea that, all else being equal in individual and team performance, a player who won MVP the previous season is more likely to take home the hardware, not less.
So if voter fatigue isn’t the primary reason for Jokić’s odds slipping this season, what is?
It appears that the far bigger factor driving Gilgeous-Alexander’s edge in the MVP race is simply the differential in team records: OKC went into Wednesday with a record 12½ games better than Denver’s. While the difference in supporting casts is substantial, and should be accounted for by the voters in some way, we’ve also always known that the best player on the best team tends to get outsized credit when it comes to MVP treatment. In some ways, it’s a testament to Jokić’s ongoing greatness that his team can be so far behind SGA’s in the standings — and be on pace for fewer wins than a year ago — and he is still viewed by insiders as deceptively close to catching up.
I do still think voters can get tired in certain cases, as we highlighted above. (We saw some of this in the NFL as well this past season, with Lamar Jackson narrowly losing out on his third career MVP for reasons that felt as much about narratives as performance.) But pointing out the select times when that was true downplays the fact that players with a chance to win their second straight MVP do actually manage to pull off the feat at a healthy rate. Of the 69 MVPs that have been awarded in NBA history, 33 (or 48 percent) were part of a multi-year streak by the same winner.
The NBA has always been a league of dynasties, and its MVP winners are no different. So if Jokić loses this one, it probably won’t be because voters got tired of him — it’ll be because they believe SGA (and his team) are simply better.
Filed under: NBA
For players on multiple teams, I weighted this by their minutes spent with each team during the regular season.
Specifically, I used stratified sampling to construct a comparable group of non-defending MVP candidates with the same WAR/82 and team W% distribution as defending MVPs.
I have Voter Fatigue fatigue. I'm tired of hearing about it! But I loved this article! Gotta challenge these ideas we take for granted!
This is incredible and clearly not what you (or I) was expecting. Keep doing the good work!