Our original NBA Tuesday miniseries gets another entry today as the league’s season just ended last night. We predicted the championship round pretty accurately, and now it’s time to review and assess 2 of the league’s major awards. This is never “easy” to do, and we’re fine with people disagreeing here. However, we still like to do this for fun and infotainment reasons, so bear with us and our silly, idiosyncratic processes.

2024 NBA MVP: Nikola Jokić, C, Denver (original, confirmed)

There is a clear Top 3 for this award, with the vote won by Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić for the third time in 4 seasons. He once again topped the NBA in both Player Efficiency Rating and Win Shares, although both Milwaukee Bucks power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo and Oklahoma City Thunder point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander were close behind. There is a second-tier of candidates, but … we’re not looking.

Antetokounmpo won the MVP vote in both 2019 and 2020; Gilgeous-Alexander is a newbie in this discussion. Jokić (17.0) was 2.4 WS clear of Gilgeous-Alexander, while he was 1.1 points clear of Giannis (29.9) in PER. Denver tied for the most wins (57) in the Western Conference with OKC while the Bucks finished with 49 victories in the Eastern Conference. We have to look at teammates here now, for clarity.

No other Bucks or Nuggets finished in the Top 20 in PER or WS, while C Chet Holmgren finished 15th in WS (8.9) for the Thunder. This means SGA had more “top-shelf” support than either the Joker or the Greek Freak. Yet we know Milwaukee also had the services of Damian Lillard, our 2020 MVP pick. When we look at the 2 rosters, respectively, Jokić outpaced his next-best teammate by 9.9 WS. That’s absolutely insane.

Lillard only posted 7.7 WS for the Bucks, but that was just 5.5 WS behind Antetokounmpo. That little detail there is huge, and when we consider the Joker’s 17.7 WS mark? There was just an 11-game range between the top teams in the Western Conference and the 10th team that made the play-in round. We confirm his MVP.

2024 NBA ROTY: Victor Wembanyama, C, San Antonio (original); Brandin Podziemski, SG, Golden State (revised)

San Antonio Spurs rookie C Victor Wembanyama won the vote here, despite posting just 3.7 WS. We don’t debate his potential, his production, or the results. But with the Spurs winning just 22 games despite his presence on the roster, it’s hard to call that “valuable” as seen in the WS mark. He did finish 12th in PER, however, which tells a lot more about his individual capabilities. Still … it all happened in a basic void.

Holmgren was the top “rookie” with 8.9 WS, but he wasn’t a real rookie as we have discussed here before: he was drafted No. 2 overall in the 2022 Draft, before sitting out the 2022-2023 season with a foot injury. Thus, as stated before in these analyses, he still had the experience of being a professional athlete for a full year before ever taking the floor in a regular-season game. We can’t reward that with this hardware, of course.

Interestingly enough, the second-best rookie in terms of WS was Dallas Mavericks C Dereck Lively II with 4.9 WS. He played for a team that finished No. 5 in the conference, just 4 games ahead of the aforementioned No. 10 team. He was a solid difference maker as a rookie. Yet so was Golden State Warriors shooting guard Brandin Podziemski (4.1 WS), who played for that 10th-place team. Without him? Hmm.

He finished third in rookie WS, second among true rookies, but his team did finish 5 games ahead of the 11th-place team. Maybe the Warriors would still have been a play-in team, and of course, Podziemski had lots of help on Golden State’s roster, albeit it aging help. The Dallas roster is more loaded with talent in its prime than the Warriors roster, so we will go with the Warriors rookie for this award (he was fifth in voting).