Will Playoff Seeding Be Deciding Factor in Epic 3-Man NBA MVP Race?

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

With Giannis Antetokounmpo’s fourth-quarter takeover in the Milwaukee Bucks’ comeback win against the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday night, an already fascinating MVP battle got even more interesting.

With just under two weeks to go in the regular season, the three-man race between Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and reigning MVP Nikola Jokic is far from settled. There hasn’t been an MVP race this wide-open this late in the season since 2017, when Russell Westbrook (ultimately the winner), James Harden and Kawhi Leonard all had legitimate cases.

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Tim Bontemps released the third and final iteration of his MVP straw poll, which features a cross-section of 100 local and national media members. Jokic had 62 of the first-place votes, while Embiid had 29 and Antetokounmpo had nine.

(In full disclosure, I was one of the writers Bontemps polled, although I do not have an actual ballot for MVP or any other league awards. My top three, in order, were Jokic, Antetokounmpo and Embiid.)

Not that one game will or should change anybody’s mind, but Antetokounmpo doing what he did Tuesday night against one of the other front-runners will likely lead to a shift in the next few days in the discussion of his place in the race, just on account of recency bias and the speed of the news cycle.

A lot will come down to how the final seedings shake out. Antetokounmpo’s Bucks are just a half game out of first place in the Eastern Conference as of Wednesday morning but just a game up on Embiid’s Sixers, who are in fourth. The top four seeds in the East (with the Miami Heat currently first and Boston Celtics third) are separated by just a game-and-a-half. There will no doubt be plenty of shifting and jostling there in the final 12 days of the regular season.

If the Bucks, who have had a somewhat quiet, up-and-down regular season coming off last year’s title run, come out ahead with Antetokounmpo putting up the numbers he is (a career-high 29.7 points per game along with 11.6 rebounds and 5.8 assists) and the Bucks look like favorites heading into the playoffs, voters will be hard-pressed not to give him his third MVP trophy in four seasons. If the Sixers finish ahead of the Bucks, Embiid carried them through a season full of Ben Simmons-related turmoil and uncertainty.

Jokic, too, has his fate up in the air with regard to seeding. The Denver Nuggets are currently sixth in the Western Conference, with a two-game cushion to avoid the play-in. They’re tied record-wise with the Utah Jazz, two games behind the Dallas Mavericks and three behind the Golden State Warriors. It’s feasible they could climb as high as third, but fourth or fifth is more likely. As long as they stay out of the play-in, the justification is there to give another award to the reigning MVP for having an even better season than he did last year, when he was the deserving winner, while dragging a Denver team missing its second- and third-best players, Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr., to a respectable playoff finish.

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As of now, a consensus seems to have formed around Jokic, but it’s nowhere near as decided as it usually is by this time of the season. A lot of times, we generally know who the MVP will be by the All-Star break. But through the first two months of the season, it appeared to be a two-man race between Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.

Now, neither is seriously in the running because they’ve missed too much time with injuries. Both will still get some down-ballot votes, as will the likes of DeMar DeRozan, Ja Morant, Jayson Tatum and Luka Doncic. But only three people—Jokic, Embiid and Antetokounmpo—are seriously “in the conversation” in more than just the token “acknowledgement of a great season” sense of the phrase. In the ESPN straw poll, only those three got first-place votes, but voters usually coalesce much more strongly around one candidate than they have thus far this spring.

Antetokounmpo will also have the biggest opportunity to draw eyeballs coming up. The Bucks have four nationally televised games in the final stretch of the season, including matchups with the Eastern Conference rival Brooklyn Nets, Chicago Bulls and Celtics. If Milwaukee takes care of those games, which come with built-in talking-head promotion for whichever team is playing, that has the potential to sway voters.

The Sixers have the easiest schedule of the three front-runners’ teams, closing it out with two games each against the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons, both tanking teams. If Embiid plays in those games, it’s an opportunity to put up big numbers and potentially help lock up a better seed, strengthening his case.

Right now, it feels like things are trending toward a repeat MVP for Jokic. Antetokounmpo’s statement game against the Sixers could swing some of the momentum back his way, but if Embiid has another big game, the talk will immediately change. All of this to say, it’s unusual—and exciting—to be this far into the season, this close to the end, with no clear winner for the league’s most prestigious award.

Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and lives in Portland. His work has been honored by the Pro Basketball Writers’ Association. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and in the B/R App.