It’s now reasonable to think that Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo finished third in balloting for this season’s NBA MVP award.
The league released the three finalists for each of its major individual awards Sunday night, with Antetokounmpo on the MVP list alongside Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, the runaway front-runners for the award.
Jokic was last season’s MVP, and the 30-year-old from Serbia is bidding for his fourth such award in five years. Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s scoring champion for the recently completed 2024-25 regular season and the leader of a team that won 68 games while setting a league record for scoring margin, is seeking his first MVP trophy.
The 26-year-old Toronto native was a prep standout at Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights Christian Academy.
Jokic and Gilgeous-Alexander were considered such big favorites that BetMGM Sportsbook didn’t even offer realistic odds toward the end of the regular season on anyone else winning. Gilgeous-Alexander was the favorite, Jokic was the second choice and nobody else had odds shorter than 500-1, including Antetokounmpo, the 30-year-old from Greece who won back-to-back NBA MVP awards in 2019 and 2020.