USATSI
Most MVP voters would tell you, at least before the season, that a single game shouldn’t impact their decision too much. There are, after all, 82 games to be considered. One game represents a bit more than 1% of a team’s season and perhaps 2-3% of a player’s overall body of work. That’s not nothing. In a perfect world, though, we’d treat it as such.
The reality of MVP voting is that it is conducted by human beings, and it would be naive to assume that some games aren’t more memorable to them than others. Head-to-head matchups between candidates are the most obvious example of that phenomenon. It’s a chance to see how the two stack up against one another directly, to see who rises up to the challenge that another great player presents.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just rose to that challenge. In a head-to-head matchup with Nikola Jokic Sunday, Gilgeous-Alexander scored 40 points and helped the Thunder win the fourth quarter by 21 points to secure a 127-103 victory over the Nuggets. Logic would suggest that MVP voters deciding between the two of them are probably going to remember this game. Does history support that idea?
Yes, but with a caveat. There’s a pretty clear line of demarcation at which head-to-head outcomes start to matter more in MVP races. Let’s take a look at the first full decade of the 21st century in MVP races. Between 2001 and 2010, MVP winners went 13-15 against the teams that employed the runner up. We’re obviously dealing with small samples, but the basic premise here makes sense. These are all great players on mostly very good teams. It stands to reason that both sides would would have some measure of success, and because this era came before the proliferation of social media and immediate, game-to-game discourse, voters were less reliant on these individual matchups in making their decisions.
Things start to change in 2011, when Derrick Rose went 4-1 against runner-up Dwight Howard and, more importantly, third-place finisher LeBron James. Those two wins over James came at roughly the same point on the calendar that Gilgeous-Alexander’s victory over Jokic did: one was on Feb. 24 and the other was on March 6. From a scheduling perspective, this is the ideal window for MVP opinions to sway. There is enough of a sample to view statistics as reliable, but there is enough basketball left that most voters haven’t made up their minds definitively. The games coming later in the season mean that their impact in the standings is more pronounced.
Perhaps most importantly, this was the first widely debated race that played out with Twitter in full swing. Narratives began to spread much faster. James was not the runner-up in 2011, but he was the two-time defending winner and, by virtue of The Decision, the season’s de-facto villain. Rose beating him twice in close games at that point in the calendar helped him run away with an award that, statistically, he almost certainly shouldn’t have won.
From this point forward, we start to see a pretty significant correlation between head-to-head performance and actually winning the MVP. Between 2011 and 2024, each season’s MVP went 25-12 against the runner-up’s team, though injuries and other factors meant the runner-up himself did not actually play in all of those games. Record, especially in a small sample, can be a bit misleading, but there are examples of single, narrative-altering games scattered throughout this period that share similarities with what happened for Rose and James.
Take the 2023 race, for instance. On the morning of Jan. 28, Joel Embiid had the fourth-longest MVP odds at +700 at Caesars Sportsbook. Jokic was the favorite at -165. They faced off head-to-head that night and Embiid won. The moment the final buzzer sounded, Embiid’s odds had dropped to +450, and by the end of the night were all the way down at +360. Betting odds aren’t a perfect reflection of voter sentiment, but they show what a difference a single performance can make for the public’s perception of a race. Embiid wound up winning the award, and his surge ahead of Jokic began in that game.
The 2020 race easily could have gone down that path. On the last Friday of the traditional regular-season schedule, runner-up LeBron James beat winner Giannis Antetokounmpo head-to-head and guarded him for most of the night. Antetokounmpo suffered a knee injury in that game that likely would have sidelined him for some meaningful amount of time, while James went on to secure another signature win against the Clippers, the other top Western Conference contender from that season. At that point, James was gaining clear momentum, but the season stalled because of COVID. That momentum dissipated when the season resumed in July and Antetokounmpo won easily.
This is not a perfect measure, of course. Jokic went 1-2 against Gilgeous-Alexander last season. Russell Westbrook went 1-3 against James Harden in 2017 and lost the signature March matchup. No two races are exactly alike, and Jokic is going to get another shot at Gilgeous-Alexander tomorrow, as the Nuggets and Thunder are playing a back-to-back head-to-head. This race is by no means over, but the recent history is starting to strongly point in Gilgeous-Alexander’s favor. Even if these head-to-head matchups should be treated as standard slices of a larger season, some measure of importance does tend to be applied to them. If Gilgeous-Alexander beats Jokic twice in a row right as the race crescendoes, that might be enough to secure the trophy.
