An award that claims objectivity, yet is shaped by shifting criteria, selective logic, and the narrative the Fourth Estate chooses to elevate
Every year, the same circus comes back around, and every year, everyone lines up behind their guy, their pick, their version of the story, pulling arguments from wherever they can, cherry picking just enough to make the case hold together, shaping the narrative until reality fits a frame that was never really there to begin with. This season, though, the noise feels louder than usual.
But the current MVP race is just the latest version of a much older pattern.
My personal opinion carries little weight. But if it did, the Serbian big man has been the league’s best player for the past six seasons, and the MVP would go to Nikola Jokić on a straightforward basis. I also understand that handing six straight awards to the same player, one who isn’t a media favorite and doesn’t exactly move the marketing needle, you won’t see him on the cover of NBA 2K, isn’t a particularly realistic outcome.
Victor Wembanyama may find himself in that position in a few years, where it’s entirely possible he becomes the most valuable player in the league for multiple seasons, only for fatigue to set in as the Frenchman starts stacking Defensive Player of the Year awards and MVP trophies year after year.
We like to pretend this is a debate about criteria. We bring up team record, seeding, advanced metrics, impact, the familiar idea of the best player on the best team, as if these were stable reference points that guide the vote year after year. In reality, none of these function as a true foundation. They are tools, selectively used or quietly discarded depending on which player the conversation is trying to elevate.
One season, we are told that winning at the highest level is the only thing that matters, that the MVP must come from a top seed because anything else would undermine the meaning of value. The next season, that same logic quietly fades into the background, replaced by a focus on individual production and statistical milestones, especially when those milestones help build a more compelling story around a different candidate.
The example of Russell Westbrook remains the clearest one, almost to the point of caricature, and at the time it was presented as something that would set a precedent. In 2017, averaging a triple double became, in itself, a sufficient argument to redefine what “most valuable” was supposed to mean, regardless of where his team actually stood in the league hierarchy. The implicit standard shifted accordingly, with individual production and historical rarity taking priority over team dominance.
A few years later, the case of Nikola Jokić tests that logic under even more demanding conditions. Not only is he producing similar triple double seasons, but he is doing it while anchoring one of the league’s best teams, combining volume with a level of efficiency that pushes into historically extreme territory, with metrics like PER placing him ahead of even Wilt Chamberlain. And yet, despite that alignment between production and winning, the conversation shifts again, as if the previous standard no longer applies.
At The Ringer, with Bill Simmons often setting the tone, last season (2024–25), an all-time statistical season was enough to make Nikola Jokić the MVP over Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a historically dominant Thunder team. This season, Jokić has been even better by those same standards, yet the case suddenly feels less compelling to the very people who made it before. The numbers did not change. The story did.
The conversation doesn’t just reflect the race. It shapes it.
What was decisive before suddenly becomes secondary. The discussion reorganizes itself around new angles, narrative fatigue, the sense that we have already seen this before, the need for a different story, or secondary criteria that had rarely been treated as central in previous races. This is not a natural evolution of standards. It is an adjustment made to fit a different outcome.
This isn’t new. The MVP has rarely been a pure measure of individual performance. In 2001, Shaquille O’Neal was still at the peak of his dominance, yet the award went to Allen Iverson, whose season carried a stronger narrative weight. In 2011, Derrick Rose captured the award over LeBron James, in a context where performance alone didn’t fully explain the outcome. The same pattern can be found in 2006, when Steve Nash edged out Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki, with narrative and team context carrying as much weight as individual production.
Coming from a European sports culture, awarding an individual trophy in a team sport on shifting and often unclear criteria has always felt ambiguous to me. In football, the closest equivalent would be the Ballon d’Or, a distinction that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo claimed 13 times over a 16-year span, largely because they were simply the best players in the world. The storytelling element was never entirely absent, but it rarely overrode that reality. Much like a Hall of Fame induction, the MVP remains an honorific distinction, one where media influence often outweighs the underlying statistical reality.
That constant movement points to something simple. There is no stable definition of the MVP. What exists instead is a dominant narrative, shaped and reinforced over time, with criteria brought in afterward to give it structure and legitimacy. The process does not start with clear standards that lead to a winner. It starts with a preferred winner, and the standards are arranged around that choice.
The award is presented as an objective distinction, grounded in performance and measurable impact, but in practice it behaves more like a yearly consensus story, one that only needs to feel coherent once the vote is cast. And as long as that dynamic remains in place, the MVP debate will never truly be about value.
It will always be about which story wins.
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