Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic wins his third MVP award, Gilgeous-Alexander second

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Welcome to a new level of the pantheon for NBA greats.

Nikola Jokic was named the MVP for the third time in his career after putting up an all-time efficient season and leading the Nuggets to a 57-25 record and second in the Western Conference.

He finished with 926 total points after racking up 79 of the 99 possible first-place votes. He beat out the Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (640 points) and the Mavericks’ Luka Doncic (586 points). Giannis Antetokounpo, Jalen Brunson, Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Domantas Sabonis and Kevin Durant also received votes.

“It’s got to start with your teammates,” Jokic said on TNT, where the award was announced. “Without them, I’m nothing. Without them, I cannot do nothing. Coaches, players, organization, medical staff, development coaches … I cannot be whoever I am without them.”

With Jokic from Serbia, Gilgeous-Alexander from Canada and Doncic from Slovenia, it marked the third consecutive season that three players born outside the U.S. finished 1-2-3 in the MVP balloting.

This time, the foreign dominance atop the NBA was even more pronounced: Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is from Greece, was fourth — so this became the first time in the award’s 69-year history that international players went 1-2-3-4 in the voting. It also became the sixth consecutive year that a player born outside the U.S. won the award.

Jokic appeared on television for the award announcement wearing a T-shirt commemorating the life of one of his mentors, Golden State assistant coach Dejan Milojević, who died earlier this year after a heart attack on a road trip.

“To be honest, I’m wearing this shirt pretty much every day, especially when I’m in the training facility,” Jokic said. “Deki was the guy who gave me the freedom. He showed me the way how you’re supposed to do things — act, train, workout. … He trusted me and I can just say, ‘thank you.’”

The Serbian superstar averaged a ridiculous 26.4 points, 12.4 rebounds and 9.0 assists, all marks ranking in the top 10 in the NBA. He also led the league in player efficiency rating (31.0), win shares (17.0), box plus/minus (13.2) and value over replacement player (10.6).

He finished second in the NBA in both double-doubles (68) and triple-doubles (25). He also shot 58.3 per cent from the field, the 10th-highest in the league. His 61.2 effective field goal percentage ranked 11th and his 65.0 true shooting percentage was 10th.

The Nuggets, meanwhile, finished second in the West and their 57-25 record matched the franchise-high for wins in a season.

“Some people say it’s the best player on the best team,” Jokic said when asked to define an MVP. “To me, it’s the guy who’s the most valuable, the team couldn’t play without him.”

Winning MVP a third time placed the 29-year-old in some esteemed company, joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, LeBron James, Moses Malone, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as the only players to have won three or more times.

This is his third win in four seasons. Only six other players in league history accomplished that feat.

His win also continues the six-year streak of MVPs born outside the United States. Cameroon’s Joel Embiid and Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo are the other winners over that span.

The Nuggets are currently taking on the Minnesota Timberwolves in the second round of the NBA Playoffs as they look to defend their title but are down 2-0. They beat the L.A. Lakers in five games in the first round.

Gilgeous-Alexander had perhaps the best feel-good story in the NBA this season, helping Oklahoma City to the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference by averaging 30.1 points, 5.5 rebounds and 6.2 assists. The Thunder won 57 games, 17 more than they did last season and 33 more than they did two years ago, their rise coinciding with Gilgeous-Alexander’s emergence as one of the game’s elite players.

“There is not a night when I don’t feel like we have the best player on the floor. … There’s no one I’d rather have on our team than him,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, the league’s coach of the year this season, said last month.

Doncic made a case for the MVP award by posting the first season in NBA history in which a player averaged 34 points, nine rebounds and nine assists per game. There had been 14 instances before this year in which a player averaged that many points and rebounds in a season — of those, five had resulted in MVP wins, including last season when Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid averaged 33 points and 10 rebounds.

This was the second time ever that a player averaged at least 33 points and nine assists per game. The other was in 1972-73, when Kansas City’s Tiny Archibald averaged 34 points and 11 assists. He finished third in that season’s MVP voting, just like Doncic did this season.

But in the end, it was Jokic who stood above all others — and the vote wasn’t close.

“I think he’s stated his case pretty well,” Nuggets guard Jamal Murray said. “He does it every night. It’s hard to do what he does and face the kind of pressure that he does each and every game. He does it with a smile on his face. He makes everybody around us better. And he’s a leader on the court and somebody that we expect greatness from every time he steps on the court and he’s delivered.”

— With files from the Associated Press