Nikola Jokic dropped a 31-21-22 triple-double against the Phoenix Suns on a Wednesday night in early March, the kind of stat line that, three years ago, would have ended any debate about the league’s best player and made the rest of the MVP conversation a formality. The Denver crowd cheered, the box score traveled on every NBA Twitter timeline by midnight, and by Thursday morning the consensus inside the writers’ room — the one that produces 100 first-place ballots in late April — was that the line was a Jokic-being-Jokic novelty, not a swing vote in the race. The race had already moved. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was going to win the MVP, and the line in Phoenix did not change anything.
That is voter drift. The actual award math will land in May with SGA taking 71 first-place votes to Jokic’s 29 — a margin that looks decisive on paper and tells a more complicated story underneath. The 71-29 split is not because SGA had the better season by any single advanced metric. By box-score-only models, Jokic was ahead. By RAPM and on-off impact data, Jokic was ahead. By every plus-minus-derived MVP forecast I had been reading since December, Jokic was ahead. The voters chose differently anyway, and the reason has very little to do with the box scores Jokic dropped in March.
What follows is what voter drift actually is, why the MVP race has produced three different winners in five years despite Jokic being the league’s best basketball player across all five, and what the SGA-over-Jokic margin actually measured.
What voter drift means in practice
The MVP award has a stated criterion — “most valuable player to his team” — that has never been operationalized cleanly. Voters interpret it through a rotating cast of secondary criteria: best player on best team, narrative completion, regular-season durability, voter fatigue, defensive engagement, leadership intangibles. The weight on each criterion shifts year to year, and the shifts are not random. They are reactions to recent voter behavior.
The cleanest example is Jokic himself. He won in 2020-21, 2021-22, and 2023-24. Each win was earned by box-score-and-advanced-metric standards that, if applied consistently, should have given him 2022-23 as well — when Embiid took the award. The reason Embiid won in 2023 was voter fatigue with Jokic, dressed up as narrative reasoning about Philadelphia’s regular-season record. The reason SGA is going to win in 2024-25 is voter fatigue with Jokic dressed up as narrative reasoning about OKC’s regular-season record.
None of this is a knock on SGA, who had an MVP-caliber season by any standard the voters might reasonably apply. He averaged 32.7 points on 53/38/89 efficiency for the league’s best team. That is a real argument. What voter drift refers to is not whether SGA had an MVP argument. It is whether the same argument made for SGA this year would have beaten Jokic in any of the three years Jokic won.
The actual voting math, and what it says
| Vote category | SGA | Jokic | Giannis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st-place votes | 71 | 29 | 0 |
| 2nd-place votes | 29 | 71 | 0 |
| 3rd-place votes | 0 | 0 | 92 |
| Total points | 914 | 826 | 695 |
The detail worth pausing on is the mirror-image distribution. SGA got 71 firsts and 29 seconds. Jokic got 29 firsts and 71 seconds. That is not a coincidence. Every voter who picked SGA first picked Jokic second, and every voter who picked Jokic first picked SGA second. The race was 100 individual coin flips, weighted by criteria each voter had personally chosen to elevate.
For 71 of the 100 voters, the criterion that broke the tie was some version of “best player on best team.” For 29 of them, the criterion that broke the tie was some version of “best basketball player.” Both criteria are defensible. Neither has been the consistent governing standard across the last decade of MVP races. The award is whatever the voting room happens to weight most heavily in any given May.
Where this gets weird
The clean voter-drift narrative misses three things, and one of them complicates the entire framing.
The first complication is that Jokic has now been picked first on Curry exactly zero ballots since the start of 2024-25. The Steph Curry zero-first-place line is the quiet headline of this MVP race. Curry had an All-NBA caliber season at age 36 for a Warriors team that finished above .500 against the Western Conference gauntlet, and not a single voter felt he had a top-three argument. That is structural disrespect with no real precedent in modern MVP voting history. It is the cost of a player who has been an MVP candidate for too long.
The second is that the 71-29 margin understates the actual closeness of the race. Several public analytics sites — Cleaning the Glass, EPM at Dunks and Threes, BPM at Basketball Reference — had Jokic ahead through April. The voters were not reading those models. They were reading the OKC team success and the SGA scoring efficiency and the Jokic third-MVP-in-five-years fatigue and turning it into a 71-vote majority. The race that looked like a 71-29 blowout in May was a coin flip in March that landed heavier on one side because of how the criteria weighting shook out.
The third is that Giannis ended up with 92 third-place votes and zero first-place votes. He had the second-best on-court impact in the league by most public RAPM-style models. The voting structure does not give him room to compete because the award became a two-horse race in the public conversation in February and never reopened. The MVP narrative compresses fast and stays compressed.
What voter drift looks like across the last five years
| Year | Winner | Best basketball player by advanced metrics | Why voter drift? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | Jokic | Jokic | Alignment year |
| 2021-22 | Jokic | Jokic | Alignment year |
| 2022-23 | Embiid | Jokic | Jokic fatigue + Embiid narrative |
| 2023-24 | Jokic | Jokic | Embiid injury reset |
| 2024-25 | SGA | Jokic (slim) | OKC team narrative + Jokic fatigue 2.0 |
The pattern is not random. Voter drift accumulates against any player who wins too many in a row, and the criteria voters cite shift to whichever metric makes the case against the recent winner. In 2022-23, the cited metric was Philadelphia’s team success and Embiid’s regular-season durability. In 2024-25, it is OKC’s team success and SGA’s scoring efficiency. Both arguments are real. Both are also conveniently available when the voting room has decided the third Jokic MVP is one Jokic MVP too many.
How to read MVP races going forward
The framework I keep coming back to, after watching this race develop since November, is short and avoids the trap of believing the public criteria the voters cite.
- The narrative gap, not the metric gap, drives the result. When Jokic and the next-best candidate are inside two impact-metric points of each other — and they have been for five years — the narrative gap decides.
- Team record is the cleanest narrative tiebreaker available. When voters need a reason to break a tie they have already mostly broken, they reach for record.
- Fatigue is a real input, not a complaint. Voters do not stay constant. The third year of a candidate’s case is structurally harder than the first, regardless of the metric.
- The race is decided in February, not April. Whichever case is winning the social conversation at All-Star break almost always finishes first.
The callback
That 31-21-22 triple-double Jokic dropped on a Wednesday night in March was, for the version of MVP voting the league used to run, a closing argument. For the version the league has now, it was background music to a race that had already moved past him in the criteria that mattered. None of this means SGA does not deserve the MVP — by the criteria the voters elevated this year, he does. It means the award is no longer a measurement of the best basketball season. It is a measurement of which best-basketball-season argument the voting room is in the mood to reward, and the mood shifts on a faster clock than the basketball does. For more on how single moments get extrapolated into season-long narratives, the trend-building piece covers the underlying mechanism. The Jokic triple-double was the season’s most absurd individual line. It will be the third or fourth most cited thing about the 2024-25 MVP race by August.
MVP voting data via Basketball Reference; advanced impact metrics via Dunks and Threes (EPM) and Cleaning the Glass.
