On Wednesday, Shams Charania of ESPN.com scooped the news of who had finally won the NBA’s 2024-25 Most Valuable Player title. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder won the award for the first time, ending a run of three-in-four wins for Denver Nuggets centre, Nikola Jokic.
During the regular season, Gilgeous-Alexander led the Thunder, and indeed the entire NBA, with a 32.7 points per game scoring average. He added 6.4 points, 5.0 rebounds, 1.7 steals and 1.0 blocks per game, leading the Thunder to an NBA-best 68-14 record and winning the first seed in the Western Conference by a colossal 16-game margin.
The Best Player On The NBA’s Best Team
Having led his team in scoring, Shai’s season marked the tenth time in NBA history that the league’s leading scorer has been on a team that has won at least 60 games. The only time in the previous nine attempts that that player did not win the MVP was back in 1996-97, when Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz was controversially awarded the title over Michael Jordan.
Advanced stats are even more favourable to Shai. Per the NBA’s own Player Impact Estimate metric, Shai led the league – and Jokic – with an 18.4 rating, while he also ranked second to the big Serbian with an 8.9 Value Over Replacement rating.
Only one other player – Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks – recorded more than 5.0 in the VORP rankings, and Los Angeles Clippers centre Ivica Zubac’s 11.7 win shares finished a distant third in that category. Both therefore serve a testament to the fact that the MVP award this season was a two-horse race. And with Jokic having already won three times, Shai had the newcomer factor in his favour (a hard-to-quantify but very real bias in the voting process that played a role in the 2011 award for Derrick Rose, amongst several others).
More importantly, though, Gilgeous-Alexander was by far the best player on by far the best team in the league to date. Neither of those facts can be disputed.
Shai Continues Streak Of International Winners
Having knocked out Jokic’s Nuggets in seven games of a competitive second-round series – the more conspiratorially-minded will note that the award has not been announced until after the winner of that series was known – Shai’s Thunder moved into the franchise’s first Conference Finals series since 2016, and blew out the opposing Minnesota Timberwolves by 26 points in Game One.
The Nuggets nearly toppled the Thunder, but to date, they are the only ones who have come close. And in doing so, Shai beat Jokic, just as he has now done in the vote. Jokic – a three-time MVP – is playing the best season he ever has, and yet the extent of both Shai and the Thunder’s brilliance justifiably prevented him from making it four.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s win makes him only the second Canadian ever to win the NBA MVP award, behind the back-to-back victories of the Phoenix Suns’ Steve Nash in 2005 and 2006. His victory also sees the NBA’s international wave of the last ten years continue in earnest.
Until 2018, the only non-American winners of the MVP award were Nash, the Dallas Mavericks’ great German forward Dirk Nowitzki, and Hall-of-Fame Houston Rockets centre Hakeem Olajuwon from Nigeria. Every year since then, though, the winner has been an international player (depending on one’s classification of Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian by birth and heritage who became an American citizen a few months before his victory).
Gilgeous-Alexander now becomes the third player in Thunder franchise history to win an MVP award, joining Kevin Durant back in 2014 and Russell Westbrook in 2017. He will inevitably also soon be named to the All-NBA first-team as well, just as he has been the past two seasons. And at the head of a Thunder snake that by some metrics just put forth the best NBA season of all time, all accolades are justified for both Shai and they.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Wins NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award