2022-23 NBA Midseason Awards Media Poll: Most Valuable Player
With just over six weeks left in the 2022-23 NBA regular season, not only will the race for who will and who will not make the playoffs heat up, but so will the race for this season’s awards.
Will Nikola Jokic be dethroned as the back-to-back recipient of the Most Valuable Player award? Is the race for the Most Improved Player award a two-man race between Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lauri Markanen? With all the great teams this season, who will ultimately be named the league’s Coach of the Year? And of course, who will win the 2023 NBA Finals?
Fastbreak on FanNation polled 25 different NBA media members, some who cover the league as a whole and some who cover an individual team, asking them these specific questions and gathering their results.
Below are the results from the voting that took place for the 2022-23 NBA Most Valuable Player award at the All-Star break:
Media Members Pick To Win 2022-23 NBA MVP:
Nikola Jokic - Denver Nuggets (17 votes)
Winning the Most Valuable Player award in back-to-back seasons, Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic seems to be the man to beat once again in this year’s MVP race.
People tend to dive into the statistics and whatnot when talking about the MVP award, but several things stick out the most about Jokic and the season he has been having.
Not only is he the best player on the best team in the Western Conference, but he leads all players in Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and he leads the league with 21 triple-doubles, 11 more than Luka Doncic, who sits second in the league in this category.
Maybe there are some who do not want to see Jokic win the award again, but he is currently averaging a triple-double on the season with 24.7 points, 11.5 rebounds and 10.1 assists per game. Only two other players have done this in league history: Oscar Robertson (1961-62) and Russell Westbrook (four times).
Why did I bring up Nikola Jokic leading the league in PER you may ask? Well, since the 2015-16 season, every recipient of the MVP award ended up leading the league in PER at the season’s end.
What Jokic continues to do and prove on the basketball court really is unmatched and with the Nuggets holding a solid lead for the 1-seed in the Western Conference at the All-Star break, it will be very hard to come up with an argument as to why he should not win this award.
Jokic received 68 percent of the total votes for MVP in this media poll and he will likely receive a larger percentage of first-place votes when the NBA has their select media vote for the real award.
Milwaukee Bucks big man Giannis Antetokounmpo received four votes and Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid received three votes in the poll, both being deserving of attention for the award as well.
Antetokounmpo has the Bucks right at the top of the Eastern Conference standings and they are once again looking like a real title threat. Embiid’s 33.1 points per game average this season trails only Dallas Mavericks Luka Doncic’s 33.3 points per game average for the league lead in scoring this season and coincidentally enough, Doncic received a single vote for MVP in this media poll.
Jayson Tatum from the Boston Celtics will also receive love in the actual vote for Most Valuable Player this season, but Nikola Jokic appears to be on a collision course with his third straight MVP award, which would put him in elite company with Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Larry Bird as the only other players to win this award in at least three straight seasons.
