Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won his second straight NBA MVP trophy on Sunday, a reward for a regular season in which he led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the league’s best record and, by the league’s view, was the best player over the 82-game regular season.
At 27, Gilgeous-Alexander now has 2 straight MVP trophies, but the race behind him says plenty about where the league is heading. Nikola Jokić and Victor Wembanyama finished as the runners-up, and Wembanyama’s case has been building fast enough to make the award feel less like a coronation than a checkpoint.
The number that underlines why Gilgeous-Alexander won is simple: he delivered across a full season while the Thunder piled up wins. That matters because MVP voting still tilts toward production over time, not just bursts of brilliance. It also explains why a player can be the league’s best over an 82-game regular season and still find the conversation around him shifting almost immediately after the trophy is handed out.
Wembanyama is the reason for that shift. From Feb. 1 to the end of the season, San Antonio went 28-2 when he played and posted a plus-23.4 net rating in those minutes, compared with plus-0.7 when he was off the floor. Over that stretch, the Spurs also produced 22.7 points per 100 possessions with him, a level of impact that left evaluators sounding as if they had run out of standard answers.
“I don’t know what the hell you do with him,” one personnel expert said, while a veteran executive put it more bluntly: “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.”
Those comments are not coming out of nowhere. Wembanyama had 13 games with a game score above 30, and 10 of them came after Feb. 1. He scored 41 points on March 30 and again on April 1, two performances that fit the way the second half of his season kept producing bigger numbers and heavier praise.
The playoff numbers pushed the same point even further. Wembanyama was 7-1 when he played at least 15 minutes, while the Spurs were 1-2 when he did not reach that mark. San Antonio had a plus-21.9 net rating in his minutes in the postseason and plus-7.1 when he sat. The pattern was hard to miss: when he was available in a meaningful way, the Spurs looked like a different team.
That is why the debate around the MVP now spills into a larger one about the league’s present tense. Stan Van Gundy said during Game 6 against Minnesota that “Victor Wembanyama is the most impactful defensive player I have ever seen in this league,” and that sort of assessment gives weight to the idea that the best player in the sport can change before the awards do.
For now, Gilgeous-Alexander owns the hardware and the season that backed it up. Wembanyama, though, finished the year with the kind of surge that makes the next version of that question feel unavoidable: has he already passed Gilgeous-Alexander as the league’s best player right now?
