I am, as you know, just a humble blogger/Substacker. But if I had a vote for the 2023-24 NBA Most Valuable Player, I’d cast it for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Sure, Denver’s Nikola Jokić keeps doing Jokić things — there’s a reason he’s currently the betting favorite to win his third MVP in four seasons. This is no knock on Jokić; if anything, it’s a testament to how great he’s been that it takes an all-time season to knock him off of his assumed pedestal. And Gilgeous-Alexander happens to be producing one of those.
Statistically, SGA has been the best player in the league this season, whether we look at my eRAPTOR Wins Above Replacement (WAR) or other similar metrics, such as Dunks and Threes’ Estimated Wins.1 On a per-82-team-game basis, Gilgeous-Alexander’s pace of 18.9 WAR is tracking for the 21st-best season by a player since the 1976 ABA merger, putting SGA in some rarified company:
That’s remarkable in and of itself for a 25-year-old. (Only Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Chris Paul and David Robinson had a season this good by that age.) But even more incredible is how SGA got here — a path we really haven’t seen many of the other players on the list above take.
If we look for players whose careers took on the same shape and quality as Gilgeous-Alexander’s through age 25, we end up with this varied group (mouse over the names to isolate their WAR arcs individually):
Statistically, the most similar early career path belonged to Jason Kidd — an interesting comparison considering both profile as big, two-way lead guards who thrive by driving and dishing while being able to shoot enough to keep defenses honest. But Kidd never peaked with a season anywhere near as great as SGA is putting together this year. In that regard, John Stockton and Steph Curry are closer comps, with Stockton getting closest to SGA’s age-25 output in his breakout 1987-88 campaign. (Curry, meanwhile, wouldn’t have his version of this season until the Year of the Warriors — and the birth of a dynasty — at age 26 in 2014-15.)
There is no perfect parallel because the particulars of SGA’s story are so unique: Drafted just 11th overall in 2018, he wasn’t a total blue-chipper like Kidd. Traded twice before the age of 21 — once on draft day (from Charlotte to the Clippers for Miles Bridges), then a year later from L.A. to OKC (as part of the Paul George deal) — he wasn’t a single-franchise icon like Curry or Stockton. Plagued by injuries, his ascent was far from linear.
To that latter point, there are only two other players in NBA history who, like SGA from 2021-22 to 2023-24…
Had a season with under 5.0 WAR/82
Produced more than 10.0 WAR/82 the next season
Then produced more than 15.0 WAR/82 the season after that
Those players? Michael Jordan and Dwyane Wade. (Remarkably, each did it twice! MJ from 1986-88 and then again from 1995-97; Wade from 2004-06 and then again from 2008-10.)
I know we’re all “so done with the ‘90s” (or the 2000s), but any comparison to those particular guys is significant. I’ve often felt like D-Wade was an underappreciated Jordan heir — blasphemous as this is, Wade’s peak season (17.9 WAR/82 in 2008-09) was actually a closer to MJ’s peak than, say, Kobe Bryant’s top year (15.5 WAR in 2005-06). No disrespect intended to Kobe, of course.
The main takeaway is that the type of season SGA is currently producing is reserved for the very best in the game’s history — and it’s even rarer to see it happen as part of such a sudden rise. Gilgeous-Alexander was only regarded as the 30th-best prospect in his high school class, was the No. 2 scorer on Kentucky behind fellow freshman Kevin Knox, and took scouts by surprise with his scoring numbers as a second-year pro with OKC in 2019-20. SGA was supposed to be pretty good, but he wasn’t supposed to be MVP good.
And certainly, he wasn’t supposed to be challenging the likes of Jokić for that hardware by the age of 25. But here SGA is, and here the Thunder are — ahead of schedule as well. We should appreciate how far he and his team have come in such a short time.
Filed under: NBA
For his part, Jokić leads in Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares and VORP, though neither of those metrics accounts for a player’s on-court plus/minus impact on his team.
Datawrapper rules, thank you.