Henry Roldán
As the NBA did not make an official announcement, Serbia’s Nikola Jokić once again dominated the circuit at will and was crowned the league’s best player for the 2021-22 season.
According to a report by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the Denver Nuggets center was voted the MVP of the current campaign over Giannis Antetokoumpo of the Milwaukee Bucks and Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Wojnarowski added in his report that the announcement by the NBA will be made later this week, recalling that the U.S. professional basketball league traditionally does not set a date for revealing the season’s award winners.
With this new award, Nikola Jokić becomes the second European player in history to win two consecutive MVPs, emulating his rival Antetokounmpo, who was the first to do so. Overall, he is the 13th professional to do so in the NBA, and the third foreigner after Giannis and Steve Nash (who is Canadian, in case you don’t remember).
In addition, with the victory of the European for the first time in league history the MVP is won in four consecutive seasons by an international figure (twice Antetokoumpo and twice Jokić).
Nikola Jokić’s MVP Numbers
In a season that was extremely complicated from the beginning for the Denver Nuggets, Nikola Jokić was a true leader as he carried the team on his shoulders and managed to set new marks in several personal records.
The Joker played 74 of Denver’s 82 games and played only nine of them alongside Michael Porter Jr. and none of them alongside Jamal Murray, who missed the entire year due to injury. But, despite these absences, the center played 33.5 minutes per game and set personal bests in points per game (27.1), rebounds per game (13.8), shooting % from the field (58.3%) and steals (1.5), while ranking eighth in the league in assists with 7.9 per game.
But that was not all. The 27-year-old Serbian became the first player in NBA history to score 2,000 points, grab 1,000 rebounds and dish out 500 assists in a single season.
Thanks to this great performance, the Nuggets qualified in sixth place in the Western Conference to the postseason after a 48-34 record, despite losing to the Warriors in the first round, Jokić was able to overcome the tough hurdle of being scored on by Draymond Green to finish the series averaging 31 points, 13.2 rebounds and 6.2 assists.
