Nikola Jokic finishes a distant second in 2025-26 NBA MVP voting

There will be no fourth MVP trophy for Nikola Jokic. Not this year, anyway.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was officially named the 2025-26 NBA Most Valuable Player on Sunday night, becoming just the 14th player in league history to win back-to-back MVPs. It was not close. SGA collected 83 of 100 first-place votes and 939 total points to Jokic’s 10 first-place votes and 634 points, with Victor Wembanyama rounding out the finalists in third at 569. Distant second is the accurate description.

A global media panel of 100 voters selected the winner of the 2025-26 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player Award.

The complete voting results ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ki6ZYk5Tq9

— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) May 17, 2026

Unlike last year’s loss, or the Embiid debacle in 2022-23, this one actually feels just.

Jokic was on another planet through Christmas. The numbers he was putting up — another season-long triple-double in the making, the league leader in both rebounds and assists per game — were historically absurd, even by his own absurd standards. Then came the most severe injury of his career: a bone bruise in his knee that shelved him for 16 straight games in December and January.

When the best player in the world misses a month, things change. Especially when he doesn’t look himself upon return. His first month back was rough. He eventually got most of it back. But “most of it” from Jokic, while still better than nearly everyone else on the planet, wasn’t quite that level — the level that has won him three MVPs and kept him parked at the top of every advanced metric for half a decade.

The final numbers were still staggering: 27.7 points, 12.9 rebounds and 10.7 assists per game. Jokic became the first player ever to lead the NBA in both rebounds and assists per game while averaging a triple-double for a second consecutive season. He met the 65-game minimum for award eligibility — barely — and like Wembanyama, he could have sat in the season’s dying days and not even qualified. He played, he always wants to, that’s Joker.

But SGA had a stranglehold on the award the entire second half of the season, and there was only the faintest flicker of late hope that Jokic could steal it. Gilgeous-Alexander was a machine all year long: he set the NBA record for most consecutive 20-plus-point games, breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s mark, and became the first player since Wilt in 1963-64 to score 20 or more in every regular-season game with a minimum of 50 games played.

He joined Michael Jordan as the only guards with at least 30 points per game on 50-percent shooting or better in four straight seasons. He became the only guard in NBA history to average 30-plus points on 55-percent-plus shooting, posting a 55.3 percent clip that topped Jordan’s 53.9 percent in 1990-91 as the best ever by a guard averaging 30. He led the league in total clutch points, won Clutch Player of the Year and posted the NBA’s highest plus-minus at plus-788 — more than 100 points clear of anyone else. All of that while leading Oklahoma City to 64 wins and the No. 1 overall seed.

The biggest question entering the vote wasn’t whether Jokic would win. It was whether he’d hold off Wembanyama for second place. Wemby was terrific when he played this season, winning Defensive Player of the Year unanimously as the youngest winner ever. But he played so many fewer minutes than both Jokic and SGA that voters couldn’t justify bumping him past the Big Honey. Jokic’s 48 second-place votes to Wembanyama’s 36 made the margin comfortable.

Even without winning, second place continues one of the most remarkable runs in award history. Jokic has now finished in the top two of MVP voting in six consecutive seasons — three wins and three runner-up finishes. Only a handful of players in the history of the sport can say anything like that. His three MVPs keep him alongside Moses Malone, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as the only three-time winners, behind only LeBron James (four), Wilt Chamberlain (four), Michael Jordan (five), Bill Russell (five) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time record of six.

Among those three-time winners, Jokic and Malone stand alone as the only ones with just a single championship ring. Bird and Magic had dynasties. Jokic has 2023, and he’d like a few more.

SGA, meanwhile, enters rarefied air. He joins Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Steve Nash, and Tim Duncan as back-to-back MVP winners this century. The Thunder franchise now has four total MVPs — adding SGA’s two to Kevin Durant’s in 2013-14 and Russell Westbrook’s in 2016-17. If SGA can add a third next season, he may be in the same conversation as Jokic, or past it with another title this summer. Maybe Victor Wembanyama, who is younger and already has a DPOY trophy, will end Shai’s streak before it gets there.

For Jokic and Denver, the MVP result is a footnote to be revisited after the big fella’s career is over. The Nuggets’ season already ended in a first-round loss to Minnesota — a bitter exit for a team that led the league in offensive rating during the regular season but ran into a Timberwolves defense that suffocated them even without several of their best players.

Jokic will be 31 next February. The window on his MVPs is not closed, though his title chances might be. He remains just behind James’s as the active leader in MVP trophies (James has four), and every year he keeps doing things no one in basketball history has done. If Jokic stays healthy for a full season in 2026-27, he could be right back in this conversation.

But this year, SGA earned it — as much as that annoys folks at 5280.

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