Woody Paige: Who’s the best? MVP contenders Jokic, Gilgeous-Alexander set for ‘dynamic duo duel’

By Woody Paige March 9, 2025 | updated 5 months ago

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Thunder Nuggets Basketball — Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, right, gets past Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic (15) to the basket Friday, Dec. 29 in Denver.
the associated press

The Nuggets-Thunder back-to-back Sunday-Monday games should be played on a neutral court at Cal Farley Coliseum in Texas and promoted as “The Thrilla in Amarilla!”

This is Ali vs. Frazier, Manning vs. Brady, Bolt vs. Gatlin, Federer vs. Nadal, Palmer vs. Nicklaus, Lemieux vs. McCarty, Hamilton vs. Burr, Crassus vs. Deldo, Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader, Wile E. Coyote vs. The Roadrunner.

Jokic The Spectacular Serbian vs. Gilgeous-Alexander The Great.

Step aside, Giannis, Jayson, LeBron, Luka. Stay out of the way, Embiid. Everybody else in the NBA, get back.

Do the Nuggets take no pity on the locals in Oklahoma City, or does OKC go all Thunder and Lightning on the Nuggets?

The NBA MVP race to the finish is between Shai and Nikola with 19 games remaining for both players and teams in the league’s regular season.

Them good ol’ boys in Oklahoma and those wise guys in Vegas are giving Jokic only two chances of winning his fourth MVP trophy.

Slim and None.

But he is just the best player in the whole universe.

The automobile-sponsored MVP Ladder last week announced that SGA had risen from second to the top rung ahead of N.J., who had been No. 1 the week before. Shai’s the betting favorite at minus-550 while Nikola has dropped to plus-350.

However, the well-respected Basketball Reference website’s MVP award tracking has Jokic at a 62.1 percent to repeat while Gilgeous-Alexander is at 27.6 for his first trophy. He finished second last season.

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Two fellow opinionizers at the network that employs me claim SGA should win the award, but each had the same belief a year ago and were wrong. Two fellow opinionizers at the newspaper that employs me believe The Joker deserves to be the recipient for the fourth time. They were right in 2024 and years before.

Gilgeous-Alexander may be the Players’ Choice because the Thunder are running away in the Western Conference and Gilgeous-Alexander has scored at least 50 points in four of his past 19 games. But Jokic is the Peoples’ Champion, especially after his historic record-shattering sensational game Friday night in Denver that reached a height never reached before at a mile high or any other elevation in the NBA. As suggested, Jokic, on a bum ankle and a gimpy leg, should have posed Wilt Chamberlain-like for a photo holding a piece of white paper with the numbers 31-21-22.

Who you got? Who knows? But what is known is that a foreign-born professional basketball player will be the Most Valuable Player in the North American sport for the seventh straight season. Previously in the annals, the honor was bestowed on three international players — Hakeem Olajuwon (Nigeria) in 1994, Steve Nash (Canada) 2005 and 2006 and Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) in 2007. Then, Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) was MVP in 2019 and ’20, Jokic (Serbia) in ’21 and ’22, Joel Embiid (Cameroon) and Jokic for a third last year.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was born in Toronto in 1998.

This season NBA rosters have listed 125 players from other countries, and one will be MVP. Will Luka Doncic or Victor Wembanyama be next soon?

The NBA, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer certainly celebrate so many national and world star athletes who are not originally from here, and those four leagues and the NFL play a plethora of games in foreign countries.

But on Sunday and Monday, Shoehei Ohtani and Juan Soto, Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid, Lionel Messi and Christian Benteke, and Hall of Fame football players Bronko Nagurski and Tom Fears – who were all born outside of the United States – turn over center stage to foreigners Jokic and Gilgeous-Alexander.

The Thunder and the Nuggets split the two games in Denver at the start of the season. These are the last two unless the pair meet again in the conference playoffs.

Gilgeous-Alexander is first in the league in point average (32.8 per game); Jokic is third (28.9). The Joker is third in rebounds (12.9); SGA, a guard, is 76th (5.1); Shai is 15th in assists (6.2), while Nikola, who is a center, is second (10.6). They are tied for second in steals (1.8). The Thunder are first at 52-11, the Nuggets are virtually tied for second at 41-22.

According to official NBA advanced stats, Jokic is No. 1 in efficiency at 42.3, Gilgeous-Alexander third at 33.3.

The MVP dynamic duo duel of the decade is thisclose.

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Woody Paige: Who’s the best? MVP contenders Jokic, Gilgeous-Alexander set for ‘dynamic duo duel’

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