Yes, there's a case for Embiid or Antetokounmpo. But Jokic absolutely deserves to be MVP

So, Nikola Jokic is the NBA’s most valuable player for the second consecutive season and Joel Embiid is gonna be mad, and everyone hates the dweebs as once again we get to debate if we can properly measure greatness.

As a certified dweeb — the derisive term LeBron James tossed out on Twitter the other day for 100 media members invited by NBA to vote on their menu of post-season awards — I’m just mad at Mike Budenholzer.

Reason being, if the Milwaukee Bucks head coach would ever play Giannis Antetokounmpo 36 minutes a game, the controversy around the MVP award would almost instantly disappear. The Bucks star would win it, and we’d briefly discuss which of the Denver Nuggets' Jokic or the Philadelphia 76ers' Embiid should finish second and then move along.

But no, Bud’s life’s work is — seemingly — to keep the most dominant athletic specimen the league has seen since prime LeBron to under 33 minutes a night (Antetokounmpo played 32.9 this season), which opens the door for other contenders.

I’m hardly exaggerating. In what has arguably been the most tightly contested and thus "controversial" MVP award debate ever, another three minutes a night from the league’s most unstoppable force likely would have made the difference.

Consider: Antetokounmpo’s line this season extrapolated over 36 minutes: 32.7 points, 12.7 rebounds and 6.3 assists with 2.7 steals and blocks, combined, with a True Shooting percentage of 63.3 per cent.

If Budenholzer had kept his seemingly invincible superstar on the floor for just a measly 45 seconds more per quarter, then Antetokounmpo wins the scoring title easily (Embiid won it by averaging 30.6 points a game, becoming the first centre to win it since Shaquille O’Neal in 1999-2000) and — combined with his overall statistical profile, efficiency, defensive acumen and another 50-win regular season for the Bucks — probably gets enough shoulder shrug first-place votes to win his third MVP going away.

But, as we know, that didn’t happen, and it’s a sin, honestly. Budenholzer’s obsession with managing Antetokounmpo’s minutes as if he were late-career Tim Duncan is robbing NBA fans of properly appreciating what has been one of the most jaw-dropping four-year runs in league history. Keep in mind, Antetokounmpo won the second of his two MVP awards in 2019-20 while averaging (rubs eyes) 30.4 minutes a game.

No one — not LeBron, not Michael Jordan, not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, not Wilt Chamberlain — has ever had a 32/13/6 season even once, and if Budenholzer would just allow Antetokounmpo to play 36 minutes a game (James played 37 minutes a game this season at 37 years old), that would be his averaged line over the past four seasons.

Anyway, this is how we get to a situation where we have to argue about whether Jokic deserves his MVP award more than Antetokounmpo or Embiid, who also deserve it. It’s a debate that unfairly has a little more oomph to it because the Nuggets were swept aside by the Golden State Warriors in five games and Antetokounmpo and Embiid have their teams in drag ‘em out second-round battles with the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat, respectively.

The MVP is a regular-season award, but in an ideal scenario for the NBA, the most prestigious individual trophy in the sport is presented to the winner on the floor before a key playoff game and gets lifted overhead in front of a delirious home crowd. Jokic accepting the award via Zoom from Serbia won’t have quite the same punch.

But is Jokic the deserving winner?

Absolutely, in my mind, and the minds of enough over voters who — like me — had the outrageously skilled centre first on their ballots. Among other reasons, he became the first player in league history to average at least 27.1 points, 13.8 rebounds and 7.9 assists, and did it with a True Shooting percentage of .661, a record of level of efficiency for a player who has the ball as much as Jokic did for the Nuggets.

How it came to this is pretty straightforward. In a three-player race where no one’s team far out-performed the other — the Sixers and Bucks won 51 games while the Nuggets won 48 — and the box score lines for each player (30.6/11.7/4.2 for Embiid and 29.7/11.6/5.8 for the Bucks’ star) were uniformly fantastic and borderline historic, voters needed to dig a little deeper to find some kind of separation.

Two elements helped Jokic’s cause: one is that he had a pretty powerful story to tell, with the Nuggets' two other max players — Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. — missing all or nearly all of the season due to injuries, last year’s MVP upped his already eye-popping productivity to keep the Nuggets relevant in the Western Conference.

Basically, without Jokic, the Nuggets were absolute trash. With him on the floor, Denver outscored their opponents by 16.4 points per 100 possessions. When he played the Nuggets had the best offence in the NBA. When he sat, they were the New York Knicks, who were 23^rd in offensive rating this past season. And, while Jokic’s defence may not in the same category as Embiid’s or Antetokounmpo’s, when he was on the floor for Denver they were a top-10 defence; when he sat they were the Houston Rockets, who were 30^th defensively in a 30-team league.  

The other argument that swayed me and — I’m sure many others — was that when the magnifying glass provided by more complex stats was applied to Jokic’s season, he showed some significant separation from Embiid and Antetokounmpo.

You don’t have to understand the math behind measures like FiveThirtyEight.com’s RAPTOR or BBall-Index’s LEBRON or Real Plus Minus from ESPN, necessarily, just that each of them reflects the efforts of some very bright, very adept basketball minds to quantify the overall impact individual players have in a fast-moving, team game.

None of them are perfect, but they provide a better guide to understanding the way players affect a game than we had before, and because Jokic was the league leader in all of these more advanced measures — and broke Wilt Chamberlain’s record for Player Efficiency Rating that had stood for 60 years — they helped tip the balance in a close race.

Coupled with the fact that Jokic played more games (74) and more minutes (2476) than Embiid (68; 2,297) or Antetokounmpo (67; 2,204), it was hard for me to overlook the Nuggets star.

Do fans of Embiid or Antetokounmpo have a right to be upset? Sure they do. There are winning arguments for each of the Big Three and that’s without wading into whether Devin Booker — who put together a career-best season while leading the Phoenix Suns to the NBA’s best record should be higher than fourth (where I had him on my ballot; the Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum was fifth).

But is Jokic winning a crime against basketball? No, not even close.

Whatever anyone thinks about Embiid or Antetokounmpo, Jokic had a ridiculous season. He became the first player in league history to accumulate 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists. He improved in almost every category on his MVP season from a year ago, and he did it without any help. He’s played more games and more minutes than his rivals and — while the MVP is regular-season award — the man did average 31 points, 13 rebounds and 5.8 assists on 58 per cent shooting  in the Nuggets' first-round loss to the Warriors.

And for the crowd who want to argue that the "dweebs" should "just watch the games," well, yes they should. But when tasked with making important decisions — the NBA’s MVP award is a legacy maker; a first-line item on a Hall of Fame bio — using all the information available is useful too.

Had analytics been more widely used or been more widely available in the past, some prior MVP awards that, in time, looked like mistakes would have likely been avoided.

Michael Jordan, for example, should probably have won the award every full season he played beginning in 1986-87 through 1997-98, giving him nine MVP’s instead of six. It wasn’t like Magic Johnson (1987), Charles Barkley (1993) or Karl Malone (1997) didn’t deserve their awards, it’s just that in close races, some added data might have tipped the balance to Jordan, and a quarter century later, Jordan as a nine-time MVP doesn’t seem wrong. 

Similarly, LeBron James should have more than four awards.

With more data available would Steve Nash have won his second MVP over 21-year-old LeBron James in 2005-06? Probably not, but then again Dirk Nowitzki might have won it instead.

Would Derrick Rose have been the youngest MVP when he won it in 2011? Nope, James should have got it that year, and on it goes. 

All the dweebs can do is watch games, listen to experts, dive into data, and try to cast a vote that makes sense. Enough of them did just that to make Jokic the MVP, and if there’s no perfectly right answer in such a close contest, it’s certainly not the wrong one.

And good news: given that Jokic is 26 and Embiid and Antetokounmpo are 27, chances are we’ll be doing some version of this dance a year from now.

Unless someone lets Antetokounmpo play 36 minutes a night.