The National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player Award was given to Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets for the second year in a row. Jokic is a centre for the Nuggets, but he has the passing touch and shooting stroke of a guard.
Jokic, who is 27, won 65 of 100 votes cast for first place. During the last campaign, he was the first choice of 91 out of 101 voters, which included members of the news media as well as fans.
Jokic, who is 6 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 211 pounds, stands out among big men because of his ability to score from within the paint and crash the boards while also hitting shots from beyond the arc and finding open teammates. During the regular season, he posted a scoring average of 27.1 points per game, which was good for second place among centres. Joel Embiid of Philadelphia, who led the league in scoring overall and finished second with 26 first-place votes, had a higher scoring average than anyone else in the league. When compared to other centres, Jokic led the pack with 7.9 assists per game.
His ability to palm the ball and perform passes, rebounds, and floaters with one hand has been compared to that of a player in water polo. Water polo is a game that Jokic liked playing as a youngster in Serbia, a country in where the sport is very popular. Because of the breadth and depth of his skill set, he serves as the pivotal component of the Nuggets’ sixth-ranked offensive unit.
Jokic’s statistics during the regular season were comparable to those of the MVP from the previous year, and he improved his defensive rebounding from 8 to 11 per game throughout the course of the season. In points, assists, and rebounds, he finished in the top 10 in the league.
He established a new record in the history of the NBA by being the first player to ever finish a season with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 500 assists. In terms of statistics for a single season, Wilt Chamberlain, Kevin Garnett, and Oscar Robertson are the only three players who have been within 10 percent of those three numbers.
The Nuggets selected Jokic in the second round of the draught in 2014. At the time, he was 19 years old and played for Mega Basket of Serbia in the Adriatic League. The emphasis was focused on Denver’s first-round picks from that year, which came as a result of a trade with Chicago and included Jusuf Nurkic and Gary Harris. Meanwhile, Nikola Jokic was seen as a speculative selection.
He made his debut in the National Basketball Association during the 2015–2016 campaign and placed third in the vote for rookie of the year after averaging 10 points per game. By the time he was in his fourth season, the 2018-19 campaign, he had established himself as an All-Star and was averaging 20.1 points per game. During that season, he guided the Nuggets to their first appearance in the playoffs in six years and their first series victory in the playoffs in ten years. In the 2019-20 season, Denver advanced all the way to the conference championships.
The guard Jamal Murray will miss the 2021-22 season due to a knee injury, which was a blow to the Nuggets. Additionally, the Nuggets were the sixth seed in the Western Conference playoffs, and they were eliminated in the first round by a red-hot Golden State team that was performing at its best at the right time, losing four games to one.
Having Jokic on the team will almost certainly result in a positive outlook for the Nuggets’ future. The previous month, he said that he anticipated signing a supermax extension of his deal with the organisation. Jokic has said that he would, without question, take the offer if it is presented to him.
