Our original NBA Tuesday miniseries returns, perhaps a bit late in the summer, as the NBA Finals ended a long time ago. We do love revisiting this analysis every year, as it always offers us a chance to ensure what we’ve been doing for more than five-plus years now is sound and legitimate. Readers may disagree; voters may disagree. Yet we provide our rationales pretty clearly. So, again: often wrong, never in doubt … Let’s go!

2025 NBA MVP: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, PG, Oklahoma City (original); Nikola Jokić, C, Denver (revised)

This is basically a two-horse race between the vote winner—Oklahoma City Thunder point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander—and the guy who has dominated the sport this decade: Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić. This really is a close analysis, as the two stars were atop multiple sabermetric categories we use here to determine our pick. Example? Player Efficiency Rating (PER): Jokić 32.0, SGA 30.7 … see?

For Win Shares (WS), it was SGA at 16.7 and Jokić at 16.4 … again, really close. Win Shares per 48 Minutes Played (WS/48)? SGA at .309 and Jokić at .307 … you get the point. One thing stands out to us, though, and it’s the Box Plus/Minus sabermetric measurement: Jokić 13.3 and SGA 11.5 … hmmm. That’s a bigger gap, and it demonstrates that Joker had “lesser” teammates, really, than SGA did, and the standings verify that.

The Thunder outdistanced the Nuggets by 18 games in the Northwest Division, and on a neutral floor, OKC would have been favored by almost nine points over Denver. Clearly, SGA was playing with a much superior supporting cast, and that inherently lowers his value. OKC might have won the division without him, whereas without Jokić? The Nuggets are missing the postseason in all probability. That clinches it for us.

This is the fourth time in five years we have awarded this hardware to Jokić. Yes, he really is that good.

2025 NBA ROTY: Stephon Castle, PG, San Antonio (original); Kel’el Ware, C, Miami (revised)

For the second season in a row, the San Antonio Spurs had the ROTY vote winner: this year, it was PG Stephon Castle (1.1 WS). The issue here, again, however, is that the Spurs won just 34 games, and Castle’s WS mark was pathetically low as he shot just 28.5 percent from three-point range and 42.8 percent overall. So he took a lot of shots in starting 47 games, etc., but five other ROTY vote getters topped his WS mark.

This is just an asinine vote, no matter which way you slice it. Three rookies posted at least 3.5 WS for playoff-contending teams: Memphis Grizzlies C Zach Edey (4.9), Miami Heat C Kel’el Ware (4.1), and Memphis shooting guard Jaylen Wells (3.5). The two teammates cancel each other out despite the Grizzlies’ 48-win season and playoff berth. The Heat snuck into the playoffs via the play-in tournament, so Ware it is.