There are very few situations in basketball where Nikola Jokic is uncomfortable. But the center of the yearly debate over who the Most Valuable Player in the league is one of them.
His face visibly contorts when the three letters are even uttered near him. He deflects questions about the award as quickly as he redirects one of his quick touch passes on the court. Six of the past seven seasons Jokic has been in the top five of the MVP race. Three of those times he has won it. But this year he has done something completely unexpected.
He actually made a case for himself to win the award.
"I think I'm playing the best basketball of my life. So if that's enough, it's enough," Jokic said March 10, after the Denver Nuggets' 140-127 win over his main challenger for this year's award, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
"If not, [Gilgeous-Alexander] deserves it. He's really amazing."
Nowhere in that statement did Jokic say he wanted to win what would be his fourth MVP award, which would tie him with LeBron James and Wilt Chamberlain. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has the most with six, and Michael Jordan and Bill Russell have five.
Nowhere did he say that it would mean a lot to him personally.
What Jokic outlined was simple: He has never played as well as he did this year, and if we agree on that premise -- that he has been even better this season than his three MVP campaigns -- then logically, he should win again.
And by almost every metric, he's right.
Besides averaging a triple-double, and leading the league with 33 of them this season, Jokic ranked among the top three in scoring (29.6), rebounds (12.7), assists (10.2) and steals (1.8), and was among the top 20 players in 3-point percentage (41.7%). No one had ever done that before. He continues to rewrite the record books.
But there's one very big difference this year than in the previous three years, a hole in what is otherwise an open-and-shut case.
Gilgeous-Alexander had a season for the ages, too, leading the league in scoring (32.7 points per game) and playing All-NBA-caliber defense while guiding the youngest team in the league to 68 wins by the largest average margin of victory (plus-12.9 PPG) in NBA history, surpassing the record set by the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers.
It is your classic best-player-on-the-best-team versus best-statistical-season MVP race.
The only time the debate seemed to take center stage or grow even the least bit heated came when the Nuggets and Thunder split back-to-back games March 9 and 10.
Gilgeous-Alexander made his case with 40 points, 8 assists and 3 steals in the nationally televised March 9 win, saying afterward, "I love MVPs, I love All-Stars, I love all the accolades that come with it, but none of it matters if you don't win."
Jokic made his case the next night with 35 points, 18 rebounds and 8 assists as the Nuggets won the far less publicized game.
For a day or two, every TV and radio show debated who should win; teammates on both sides campaigned for their guy; and voters were left with a month to sort through everything before casting their votes. Since then, both men have gone out of their way to compliment each other for a hell of a season.
But whatever debate there was has given way to the playoff drama about to transpire.
This second-round matchup between the Thunder and the Nuggets will bring all of it back into focus, starting with Game 1 in Oklahoma City on Monday night. The MVP is expected to be announced during a live TNT broadcast during this round of the playoffs.
This means Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokic (and Giannis Antetokounmpo too) will be asked to join a livestream and await the announcement of the most important individual award in basketball at a time when their entire focus has shifted to team success.
"It is the last thing on both of our minds," Jokic said Saturday night after the Nuggets finished off the LA Clippers in Game 7 of their hard-fought first-round series.
The votes have long since been cast. And winning the MVP hasn't correlated with winning an NBA title since Stephen Curry did it in 2015. In fact, none of the previous nine MVP winners has made it past the conference finals.
But when asked about Gilgeous-Alexander as a player, Jokic was far more inclined to talk.
"He's a very different player," Jokic said. "He's playing on so many levels, speed, as a scorer. Everything looks so easy for him. Even when you are like, 'Oh, that's a good defense.' It feels so easy for him and he's amazing with a change of speed, change of rhythm, ballhandling. He can post up guys, he can go by guys, his shooting at the midrange is unguardable basically. He's a very special player."
Gilgeous-Alexander has taken a different approach in how he has handled the attention that comes with an MVP race. He has acknowledged how much it would mean to him, and that he would like to win. But each time he does, he reiterates that the only goal that really matters to him is the Thunder winning.
Which has left the job of campaigning to surrogates. Denver coach Michael Malone had historically been Jokic's hype man. But after he was unceremoniously fired with just three games left in the season, Nuggets swingman Christian Braun took over.
"I think that Nikola had maybe the greatest season ever," Braun said Saturday night. "I don't know if you'll ever see a player do what he did ever again in one singular regular season. They were both great. The Thunder are an amazing team, Shai's an amazing player. So there isn't any wrong choice. But to see what Nikola did night in and night out, I don't know that you'll ever see that again."
In December, Thunder center Chet Holmgren tweeted simply, "Lu Dort for DPOY and Shai for MVP or we riot."
It is an intriguing subplot to this series that both of the front men will do their best to ignore.
Asked whether he thought Jokic cared whether he wins, Braun said, "I know for a fact he doesn't."
Thunder coach Mark Daigneault agreed.
"I know Shai a lot better than I know Jokic," Daigneault said Sunday afternoon. "But I think I know enough to know that neither one of them are going to get distracted by that. Both of them are going to be fully invested in the series. It's a supplement to the series. But it's really, it's not part of the series at all."
