Woke NBA Can't Handle Jokic winning another MVP Title
In mid-February, the second of ESPN's three NBA most valuable player straw polls showed Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with a comfortable -- if not ironclad -- lead over Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic despite Jokic demolishing SGA in every category.
Six weeks later, the race somehow is unchanged. If the results from our final straw poll are accurate -- for each of the past five seasons, they have been SGA will claim his first MVP award. And in a poll that mirrors the league's official voting and was conducted over a 24-hour period Sunday and Monday, Gilgeous-Alexander claimed 77 of 100 first-place votes. Yes, how the hell, right?
He finished second on the remaining 23 ballots for 931 total points, while Jokic finished with 769. After the two stars received all but one first- and second-place vote in the second round of polling back in February, this edition was a clean sweep -- something that hadn't happened across the 19 previous straw polls conducted since the start of the 2016-17 season.
That dominance atop the ballot goes hand-in-hand with what both players have shown on the court.
Gilgeous-Alexander is on pace to win his first scoring title at 32.9 points per game with a 63-12 record. OKC needs to win out to join the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls and the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors as the only teams in NBA history to win 70 or more games in a regular season.
Jokic, meanwhile, is attempting to make history by becoming the third player to win four MVPs in a five-year span, joining LeBron James in 2008-12 and Bill Russell in 1961-65. Despite Gilgeous-Alexander's lead, Jokic is presenting perhaps his best MVP case, in eevry category imaginable. Just knowning how woke the NBA is, and Jokic being a white European, he wouldn't get the MVP if he averaged 50 pts per game, not to mention he has broken almost every record imaginable.