Report: Thunder's Shai Gilgeous-alexander To Be Named Nba Mvp

This year's NBA MVP announcement was put on hold while the players who will finish one-two in the voting — Denver's Nikola Jokic and Oklahoma City's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — went head-to-head in an epic playoff series in the last couple of weeks. With that series in the rearview mirror and the Thunder moving on, the league is announcing the winner on Wednesday.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be named NBA MVP, reports ESPN’s Shams Charania. That has been the expected outcome, albeit in a close race, and it will be made official on TNT later tonight.

Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo are the other two top-three finalists for the award, with Jokic almost certainly finishing second. The Celtics' Jayson Tatum is a lock for the No. 4 spot.

Gilgeous-Alexander led the league in scoring at 32.7 points per game and was the offensive engine of a 68-win Thunder team. He also averaged 6.4 assists and 5 rebounds a game this season.

Jokic's backers in the race point to the legitimate argument of him averaging a triple-double this season of 29.6 points, 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists a game. However, the argument that he drove winning more than Gilgeous-Alexander fell flat with enough voters for two key reasons: 1) SGA is a much better defender and that is a key to winning, especially with this Thunder team; 2) To say Jokic had to do more because he had a lesser team around him is to punish Gilgeous-Alexander because his GM, Sam Presti, did a better job of roster construction than Denver’s now-fired GM Calvin Booth. It's not on the player what teammates he has around him, it's how he leads and interacts with them, and both Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokic were brilliant on that front.

Gilgeous-Alexander becomes the 11th player in NBA history to lead the NBA in scoring and be on a 60+ win team — and with SGA, 10 of them won MVP. (The one that didn't was Michael Jordan in the 1996-97 season when voters gave it to Karl Malone, a case now synonymous with voter fatigue.)

Gilgeous-Alexander, born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, continues the trend of foreign-born MVPs. This is the seventh year in a row a player born outside the United States has won the award (the last American to do it was James Harden in 2018).

SGA is the third Thunder player to win MVP, joining Kevin Durant (2014) and Russell Westbrook (2017). The Thunder drafted MVPs in three straight years with Durant, Westbrook and Harden (who won his with Houston).