The raw thought of betting on the NBA’s MVP award is pretty daunting. You’re trying to pick the single most valuable player out of all 450 or so currently on an NBA roster. When you look at who actually wins this award, though, it gets substantially easier. If we use LeBron James in 2012 as a starting point, every recent winner has had two things in common. They were all either a First- or Second-Team All-NBA selection in the previous season, and they were all between the ages of 24 and 28 (using Basketball-Reference’s Feb. 1 cutoff for season age).
Right away, we’re down to four viable candidates: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brunson. Obviously we’re not entering the 2024-25 NBA season with only four MVP candidates, but it goes to show you just how rigid this award tends to be. You don’t win it out of nowhere. You don’t win it as a last gasp of your prime. There is a clear arc for MVP winners. It goes to All-NBA players hitting the absolute peak of their powers.
How do you find those players? We’re usually looking for a few things:
- You have to score. This is no longer negotiable. Steve Nash wouldn’t win the award in today’s league. Every winner since Kobe Bryant in 2008 has averaged at least 25 points per game except for Stephen Curry in 2015, who beat that number on a per-minute basis but sat out too many fourth quarters in blowouts to get their in actuality. Notably, Nikola Jokic has averaged below 25 points per game only once in the past four seasons. That was his non-MVP 2022-23 season.
- Winning used to carry a bit more weight in the race, but Jokic and Russell Westbrook have lowered the bar slightly. In their cases, their were extenuating circumstances. Westbrook hit a statistical milestone many thought unachievable (averaging a triple-double), and he did so after Kevin Durant left his team. Jokic took a team missing its second- and third-best players to the playoffs. If you don’t have somewhat similar circumstances, your best bet is usually to win. We have had 16 No. 1 seeds win MVP in the 21st century, five No. 2 seeds, two No. 3 seeds and two No. 6 seeds.
- This is the award in which availability tended to matter most even before the 65-game minimum was instituted. Joel Embiid was the only winner to miss more than 11 games during the period in which media took over for players as voters. Among 21st century MVPs, 18 of 25 winners have played at least 75 games or the shortened-season equivalent.
- Voter fatigue tends to exist in two specific ways. There is statistical evidence suggesting that voters expect second-time winners to have better seasons than they did in their first. There is also obviously ample evidence suggesting that voters are against any player winning three times in a row, but as there is no possible three-peat available on this year’s board, that isn’t relevant. Once a player has won twice, there is little evidence suggesting they need to outdo themselves in their hunt for any subsequent trophies.
- There’s not exactly a way to quantify this, but as someone who has lost money betting Jayson Tatum to win this award several times, it is something that I have come to believe: MVP winners almost always have a single, ultra-elite skill. They are the best in the NBA at something, anything, or they come very, very close. Look at the last 20 MVPs. Steve Nash and Nikola Jokic were the best passers in the NBA when they won their trophies. So was LeBron James, but he was the best player in the NBA at so many different things that we hardly need to cover his qualifications. Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant were the best one-on-one scorers of their eras. James Harden has a statistical case against Durant by the time he won, but even if you don’t think he ever surpassed him, he was clearly the best overall shot-creator in the NBA at that point when you factor in his own elite passing. Stephen Curry was the NBA’s best shooter. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Russell Westbrook generated the most rim pressure excluding perhaps James. The two players that are hardest to quantify are Joel Embiid and Dirk Nowitzki. Embiid at least won the scoring title during his MVP year, and he was clearly the best drawer of fouls. Nowitzki was only the third-most efficient high-volume isolation scorer of his MVP season (trailing Kobe Bryant and Gilbert Arenas), but he was also doing that as a big man in the midst of only the sixth 50-40-90 shooting season in NBA history. So if you combine “third-best one-on-one scorer” with “best shooting big man of all time to that point,” you get to shooting and/or scoring as a reasonable ultra elite skill. While versatility is obviously nice, this isn’t an award for jack-of-all-trades-types. Your value needs to flow primarily out of a single, signature skill.
- Once you get beyond the players who contend for the award every year, you should only be thinking about ceiling. If you’re considering a candidate with an injury history or off-court issues or an iffy roster, remember that the odds will reflect all of your concerns. You’ll get proper value for the risks you take with your bets. You just have to ensure that the risks you take are on players who have MVP ceilings, because after all, there are only two outcomes here. You either win the award or you don’t. There are no points for fifth-place finishes. The player with an MVP ceiling and a floor as, say, the 40th-best player in a given season is far more valuable for our purposes than the player whose ceiling is a fifth-place finish but whose floor is a lower-end All-NBA choice. Look at how players have played in their best stretches. Look for those signature skills. Imagine what their season looks like if they are perfectly healthy and everything on their roster clicks. That player’s baseline doesn’t matter. His possible peak does.
So now that we’ve established what we’re looking for, here are the best bets among preseason NBA MVP candidates.
The favorites
The following candidates have odds of +1000 or shorter
We introduced the two immutable rules of recent MVPs above, and four players checked both boxes. Two are in this group, and yes, I would advise you to bet both Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (+600) and Luka Doncic (+370). I’d just go about betting both of them differently.
Gilgeous-Alexander is the player to take now. The Thunder have a chance to run away with the No. 1 seed, and if they do, he’s going to dominate the early MVP news cycle. You don’t have to worry about volatility here. Gilgeous-Alexander has replaced Kawhi Leonard as the NBA’s most consistent scorer. He scored more than 40 points only twice last season… but was held below 20 only six times. Look at last season’s numbers. If you think something in the neighborhood of 30 points, six assists, five rebounds and two steals on the best team in the Western Conference is MVP-caliber, this is your guy barring something unforeseen. That same season just finished second, and as we’ll cover shortly, last year’s winner isn’t quite as appealing this time around.
Doncic is going to factor into the MVP race. It just won’t happen right away. Doncic tends to get stronger as seasons progress, with the Mavericks’ 2022-23 lottery season being the main outlier. His scoring grew by more than four points per game after New Year’s Day during the 2021-22 season. Last season, it was nearly identical on both sides of the holiday… but remember, everybody else’s scoring declined in the second half of the season because the NBA stopped calling as many fouls. That Doncic’s didn’t suggests he gained steam throughout the year, which his stellar postseason reflects. The Mavericks are going to be great by the end of the season, but they have kinks to work out here. While starting Klay Thompson would supercharge their offense, it would hurt the defense that sparked their turnaround last season. They’re going to have to figure out the best ways to deploy Thompson, Naji Marshall and Quentin Grimes as replacements for Tim Hardaway Jr., Derrick Jones Jr. and Josh Green, respectively. That is going to take time. My advice here would be to give Dallas a month to work out some of the kinks, let a different favorite emerge, and then grab more favorable Doncic odds around Thanksgiving or the beginning of December. These are the two players I expect to control the race. I am as confident in either Gilgeous-Alexander or Doncic winning this award as I could be in picking two players out of 450 to earn the league’s most prestigious individual honor.
Our three other candidates are the last three players to win the award. History has just told us that their time has now passed. Nikola Jokic (+425), Joel Embiid (+700) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (+850) all still have viable “best player in the NBA” claims. They could easily hoist the Bill Russell Finals MVP trophy in June. But this is Jokic’s age-29 season and Antetokounmpo and Embiid’s age-30 season. They’ve aged out of the 24-28 window that has so firmly guided voters over the past decade and change.
That doesn’t mean they’re out of the race, obviously. But it holds up to what we’ve seen on the court these past few years. Embiid has missed an average of 23.4 games per year over the past five seasons. Antetokounmpo is at a more reasonable 12.8, but remember, he’s gotten hurt in each of the past two postseasons, and had the 2019-20 season not been suspended due to COVID-19, he likely would have missed meaningful time in March and April due to an injury sustained right before the shut down. They are both still in their primes when it comes to peak performance. They are also both at the point in their careers in which it no longer makes sense for them to push for MVP awards. Keeping them healthy into May and June is what matters. They are both candidates to miss the 65-game cutoff. Even if they get there, how many minutes are they going to play? How hard will they fight for top seeding? Think of all of the post-MVP seasons in which LeBron James was clearly still the NBA’s best overall player, but for some reason or another, wasn’t earning the hardware to reflect it? That’s roughly the stage Antetokounmpo and Embiid have reached. As good as ever. Just not as profitable across an 82-game regular-season.
Jokic is a more interesting case. He never gets hurt. He’s also won this award in three of the past four seasons. He typically sweeps the advanced metrics, and there is a certain bloc of voters who will default to him off of that. But just about everything that happened to the Nuggets between the end of the regular season and now has hurt his chances at a fourth trophy. They made a big seeding push down the stretch that they publicly regretted. They lost Kentavious Caldwell-Pope for nothing. They made a relatively large investment in a backup center when they gave Dario Saric the taxpayer mid-level exception. They hurt their spacing when they signed Russell Westbrook. Now, if Jokic overcomes all of this? He probably wins MVP again. But it seems far likelier that the Nuggets take a step back in the regular season, and without the absences of Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. to explain it like he had in 2022, he just loses some steam among voters. Even if you think Jokic is so brilliantly individually that none of this matters, well, you’re getting a favorite’s odds. It’s rare that you need to lock in +425 on anyone early on. Is anything going to happen in, say, the first month of the season that drastically reduces those odds? I’d rather sacrifice a bit of upside and get Jokic with a better idea of what his team is like in November than pay a premium for a favorite I don’t expect to win.
The middle of the pack
The following candidates have odds between +1000 and +2500
We only have four candidates to cover in this section, and I’m not especially interested in any of them. Let’s get this out of the way: nothing could compel me to bet Victor Wembanyama (+2000) because his team isn’t good enough. Even if he is the best player in the NBA this season, he has a roster that is otherwise potentially not even Play-In-caliber. You don’t win MVP taking a 35-win team to 45 wins. Wembanyama will have plenty of shots at this award. I’m not there yet.
Jayson Tatum (+2500) fails the signature-skill test. His value comes from his lack of weaknesses. Tatum is very good at basically everything. But he has never made an All-Defense team. He’s never average five assists or nine rebounds. He has shot between 35 and 39% on 3-pointers in each of the past four seasons. He’s never finished a season among the top five scorers. It also doesn’t help that he has a teammate in Jaylen Brown that is, at least by these measures, essentially just a slightly worse version of him: very good at everything, not at the absolute top of the league in anything. These types of players are extraordinarily valuable in a playoff setting. Boston is the defending champion, after all. But they just aren’t the type of player that typically wins MVP. Tatum is probably going to be a victim of his own success to an extent as well. The Celtics just won 64 games. If Boston wins 59 this season, what would under any other circumstance be viewed as an enormously successful season will lose points by comparison. Tatum is going to be on ballots. He’s finished in the top six in each of the past three seasons. But he’s never finished in the top three. He lacks that single, premium skill that the players who win this award every year always seem to have.
Anthony Edwards (+1400) might have the premium skill, but he’s not in a position to showcase it. He might be the NBA’s most electric athlete at the moment, but he plays on a two-big roster that features a small forward in Jaden McDaniels with a shaky jump shot. He makes lemonade out of that situation, and you certainly can win MVP as the primary creator on a defensive juggernaut. The recently retired Derrick Rose is the template for Edwards here. But such MVPs are rare. The Timberwolves ranked 17th on offense last season. MVP is primarily an offensive award. Westbrook is the only MVP since Rose not to play for a top-10 offense, and Edwards isn’t going to average a triple-double. His numbers just aren’t going to hold up to the other candidates.
If I were going to take anyone in this group, it would be Jalen Brunson (+1800), and even he doesn’t enthuse me much. There’s an argument that Brunson’s scoring reaches the signature skill threshold. He finished fifth in the NBA in points per game a season ago and rose to second place from Feb. 1 on. Of course, that is also the period in which Julius Randle was injured. He’s back now. Mikal Bridges is going to take a fair number of shots as well. There are more mouths to feed now. If you’re a glass half-full optimist, you could argue that the absence of Mitchell Robinson means New York will have to play smaller, more spacing-friendly lineups that will help Brunson’s numbers. I’m in the glass half-empty camp. New York’s offensive identity starts on the glass, and Brunson no longer has a natural pick-and-roll partner. Isaiah Hartenstein was deceptively valuable in that regard. There are ways the Knicks can overcome the center weakness as a team. I just don’t think that aligns with Brunson’s MVP candidacy. That he provides little on defense doesn’t help his case either.
The long shots
The following candidates have odds longer than +2500
Remember, we’re not talking about baselines at this point. We’re looking for best-case scenarios. There are two standouts in that regard: Ja Morant (+3500) and Zion Williamson (+10000). Injuries could feasibly knock either of them out. Off-court nonsense is a threat to Morant. The Western Conference is so deep that either could plausibly be on a play-in team. But let’s talk about best-case scenarios here:
- We know the Grizzlies can play elite regular-season basketball because they were the No. 2 seed in the 2022 and 2023 postseasons. It’s not a leap to suggest they could get back there. We can also be reasonably certain the Pelicans have that ceiling because they had the NBA’s third-best net rating between C.J. McCollum’s return and Brandon Ingram’s injury last season. The Grizzlies are relying on a rookie center (Zach Edey). The Pelicans are relying on… no center? Daniel Theis? The position is a major question mark for them. But the bones of a winner exist for both.
- Both check the signature skill box. They have both led the NBA in paint points across a full season. Their signature skill is rim-pressure, much as Westbrook’s was.
- This is Williamson’s age-24 season and Morant’s age-25 season. If you consider last year a throwaway for Morant, this is the first time both will be in their historical MVP age window.
- Both have averaged 25 points per game across multiple seasons, so hitting the scoring checkmark shouldn’t be unreasonable.
If you’re a single-candidate bettor, Morant and Williamson aren’t for you. These are portfolio picks, because they are the long shots with real chances to pay off. Their odds reflect that, and if you buy into the idea that narratives shape votes, it’s so easy to imagine the story that would lead to either of these two winning.
How simple is a “Ja Morant figured it out” narrative? Isn’t that the sort of story media voters want to be able to tell? Imagine a 10% scoring and assisting improvement coupled with a few contrite interviews in which he owns up to previous mistakes and vows to embrace his responsibility as the face of the Grizzlies? The path is there and it’s easily visible.
It’s not quite as clean as Williamson, but there’s always something to any “here comes the phenom” story. It’s been forgotten now, but Williamson came into the league with nearly as much hype as Wembanyama. Injuries have played a part in his relatively disappointing career thus far. So has his roster and his conditioning. New Orleans not having a center is going to manifest in a few problematic ways, but it does mean more space for Williamson to work with, and if he winds up defending centers well, he’s going to get credit for it. If that’s how this plays out, there will be “we gave up on him too quickly” stories left and right.
These are the two longer shots I’d consider must-haves if you’re building out a full portfolio. The only other one that’s even on my radar is Tyrese Haliburton (+10000). We saw a version of the best-case scenario last November and December. Before his January injury he was averaging a hair below 56 points of combined offense per game when you factor in what he generated off of assists. When I made my quarter-season awards picks last December, Haliburton was in third. Jokic and Embiid were ahead of him, and as we’ve covered, they’re weaker candidates this year. The scenario here involves a now-healthy Haliburton picking up where he left off before his injury, but the Pacers being better on both ends thanks to the presence of Pascal Siakam and development from the team’s youth. He’s a clear third-place in this group to me, but still potentially worthy of a small play.
I’m out on all of the old stalwarts. I don’t trust LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Stephen Curry to play 65 games or win enough to seriously compete for the award. Beyond those three and potentially Anthony Davis, there just isn’t anyone else that’s good enough to feasibly win this thing barring the sort of improvement we just can’t project. As we covered way back in the introduction, there just aren’t that many realistic MVP candidates in any given season. It’s very hard to rank among the absolute best players in the sport, and those who do rarely get there overnight. For now, we have a pretty clear idea of what the field looks like, and these are the candidates that make the most sense.
