When it comes to naming the best player in the NBA, there are typically two kinds of debates. For most of the past 15 years or so, we've been limited to the far duller version. LeBron James was the best player in basketball for at least a decade and possibly more. Michael Jordan held that same title for a similar period of time in the 1990s. The league may have ebbed and flowed around them. Other players might have beaten them. But the basketball world never bothered to doubt their station. Everyone else was fighting for second place.
What's so fascinating about the other type of debate is how similarly it is often treated to the first. When the NBA lacks a prime Jordan or James, it tends to adopt a "what have you done for me lately?" attitude. Someone wins the championship, and that player is coronated as the league's new king. Giannis Antetokounmpo came one shoe size away from losing to Kevin Durant in 2021, but when he ultimately won the title, he seemingly grabbed the crown. He lost last season with sidekick Khris Middleton sidelined due to injury, and then he himself declared reigning Finals MVP Stephen Curry the new top dog. "The best player in the world is the person that is the last one standing," Antetokounmpo said in September.
By this logic, the best player in the NBA is Nikola Jokic. He just won his first championship. He'll enter next season as the reigning Finals MVP, and he's already won two regular-season MVP awards. These are some of the benchmarks we'd expect a "best player in the world" to hit. Jokic's case as the NBA's best offensive player is ironclad. There is not a better passer on Earth than him and he just averaged 30 points per game across a playoff run. Any questions about his playoff viability boiled down to the defensive flaws that his limited mobility created, but at the very least, he's now proven that those vulnerabilities are at least not so great that they cannot be overcome. He's an NBA champion. Rings are unassailable.
Jokic was the best player in the playoffs we just witnessed and it wasn't close. He was the best player in the regular season from October through February. He likely would have been the best player in March and April as well if the Nuggets hadn't already clinched the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference, and he has two trophies to show that he was the best regular-season player of 2021 and 2022. Unsurprisingly, the player who played the best basketball for most of the past three years is probably the best basketball player in the world. When next season begins and the unofficial rankings start to pour in, Jokic is going to be at the top of every list.
And yet, it would be hard to argue that Curry or Antetokounmpo have gotten demonstrably worse than they were at the time of their championships. Antetokounmpo, in some ways, has even gotten better. Curry became the first player in NBA history to score 50 points in a Game 7 six weeks ago. There's not much of an argument suggesting that Jokic is demonstrably better than he was two years ago, either. A bit more experienced, perhaps, but his best-in-the-NBA metrics have all been more or less stable across the past three seasons.
His circumstances, however, were not. Jamal Murray missed the end of the 2020-21 season and the entire 2021-22 season due to a torn ACL. Michael Porter Jr. missed most of the 2021-22 season due to a back injury. If we treat Antetokounmpo's measure of the league's best player as the one who is holding the trophy when the games stop, Jokic didn't really have a chance at that distinction because the players who were supposed to help him get there were injured. If Jokic's team were healthy, it is entirely possible that he would be a three-time defending champion right now.
It is also quite possible that Antetokounmpo would be hoisting his third trophy right now if not for Middleton's injury a season ago and his own in the first round against the Miami Heat this spring. It certainly seemed as though he was heading for multiple rings when he scored 50 points to close out the Phoenix Suns in 2021. At that point, Antetokounmpo's "best in the world" case appeared as ironclad as Jokic's does today.
And yet, both have had playoff disappointments independent of circumstance. Jokic was never going to beat the Suns in 2021 or the Warriors in 2022, for example, but the degree to which they tortured him in pick-and-roll still created reasonable doubt about how he'd hold up across four rounds. Antetokounmpo's fourth-quarter offense likely cost him the Miami series this year and the 2019 Eastern Conference Finals against the Raptors.
It's what separates the best players in the NBA today from the best players of those less robust debates. James and Jordan didn't have weaknesses. There were things they didn't do at quite a world-class level, but at their peaks, there was nothing opponents could use to effectively game-plan against them. Make Michael Jordan shoot 3's? Cool, he's just going to hit six of them in the first half of a Finals game. Bait LeBron James into mid-range jumpers? He'll still put up 37 points in Game 7 of the Finals. This is the standard fans have grown accustomed to. It's not the future they should expect.
And there's something deeply compelling about that. It almost validates Antetokounmpo's theory. We now live in a world with no flawless players. There is no Jordan or James lording over the game from on high. Jokic and Luka Doncic are vulnerable defensively. Antetokounmpo isn't a late-game shot-creator. Kevin Durant can't stay healthy for six months. Joel Embiid can't stay healthy for six weeks. Curry is small. James himself is old. With no easy way of quantifying the impact of these weaknesses, recency bias almost makes sense as a ranking strategy. At least we know the reigning champion's flaws weren't significant enough to prevent him from becoming the champion in the first place.
But just as circumstances changed for Jokic and Antetokounmpo over the past few seasons, they'll continue to change for the two of them and everyone else moving forward. Perhaps Antetokounmpo's team is the healthy one next season, or maybe he'll get to settle things with Jokic on the court in the Finals. Maybe Jokic runs into a few more opponents with the sort of small, quick guards that are best-suited to attack him in pick-and-roll. The only such opponent Denver saw this postseason was Phoenix, whose depth was so compromised by the end of that series that Durant and Devin Booker were essentially the only reliable players left standing.
Or maybe Doncic eventually finds himself with a collection of teammates capable of challenging those two. Maybe the Lakers give James the ball-handling support he needs to properly pace himself before turning back the clock when it counts, or the Warriors find a way to balance their budget without sacrificing Curry's support structure. It won't be long before Victor Wembanyama crams his way into these discussions. Zion Williamson and Ja Morant have already poked their nose into the room, and if both can actually remain on the court, they'll have something to say about all of this as well. Jayson Tatum has come close several times already.
A year from now, one of those players is probably going to hoist the trophy, and whoever it is will probably receive a similar coronation. But with no James- or Jordan-like titan towering over the league, the reality is that we might cycle through several "best players in the league" in the near future. That crown is Jokic's today. Let's not pretend we have any clue whose it will be next.
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