Nikola Jokic, the Denver Nuggets and the rest of the NBA world have been waiting around for the league to finally announce when they will be handing out the 2024-25 Kia Most Valuable Player Award. The announcement will come on TNT Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. Denver time, ahead of the opening tip for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Indiana Pacers and New York Knicks.
The winner of the 2024-25 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player Award will be revealed by @NBAonTNT tonight at 7 p.m. ET.
The three finalists:
▪️ Giannis Antetokounmpo of @Bucks
▪️ Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of @okcthunder
▪️ Nikola Jokić of @nuggets pic.twitter.com/Q6C4AaJa4v
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) May 21, 2025
Jokic is one of three finalists for a fifth consecutive year and is joined by Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. This is the third time that Antetokounmpo will have finished in the top three for the award voting, highlighted by his back-to-back victories in 2019 and 2020. For Gilgeous-Alexander, this will be his third straight year in the top five and the second straight as a finalist. He finished in second place to Jokic a season ago.
There has been some confusion amongst the NBA fanbase as to why it’s taken the league so long to announce the award winner. In the last three seasons, it never took the NBA anywhere near as long to announce who was the winner of the award.
Date the NBA has announced the last 3 MVP’s
2022: May 11th
2023: May 2nd
2024: May 8th
2025: May 20th and counting
— Matt (@sixringsofsteeI) May 20, 2025
The league has announced it on TNT’s “Inside the NBA” in recent years, and has usually held the ceremony on the home floor of the winner’s team on a TNT broadcast before a playoff game. However, if Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wins the award, that would mean that the ceremony would almost certainly be on ESPN ahead of Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals on Thursday night, a move that the league has not done recently.
Jokic became just the fourth different player in the history of the association to average a triple double over the course of an entire regular season with a career-high 10.2 assists per game to go along with 29.6 points and 12.7 rebounds per game. No other player has ever finished in the top three in each category. He led the Nuggets to the No. 4 seed in a packed Western Conference, despite the injuries to Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray in the regular season and the turmoil between his head coach and front office that led to a spring cleaning just before the playoffs.
Gilgeous-Alexander led the NBA in scoring with 32.4 points per game as he was the engineer of an Oklahoma City team that finished with a 68-14 record and cruised to the top overall seed in the Western Conference. While a good chunk of his scoring comes from the free throw line, as seen in Game 1 against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night, he was still able to hit big shots when it mattered against Denver in the West Semis as they knocked the Nuggets out in seven games.
Antetokounmpo was one of the lone bright spots for a Milwaukee team that is headed to a nasty place, as he averaged 30 points and 12 rebounds per game for the No. 6 seed Bucks without a lot of help by his side before being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers. With how the final NBA Straw Poll was voted on towards the end of the regular season, it seems that the Greek superstar should finish in third place.
Former Nuggets head coach Michael Malone made his vote clear on Tuesday night, saying that he believed that Gilgeous-Alexander showed why he will be the third player in Thunder history to win this prestigious award. Will the 100 media members who vote on the award go the same way as Malone, or will they flip their minds from the final Straw Poll to award the Joker his fourth MVP in five seasons and put him into rare air in the NBA record books? The late announcement has raised some questions, and maybe the league has one final trick up their sleeve for Jokic and the Nuggets.
