Two of the top three players in the NBA will face each other Monday. The other, according to MVP voters, will be watching from the couch. Nuggets center Nikola Jokic finished in second place in the 2025-26 MVP vote, the league announced Sunday night. In what was widely regarded as a three-horse race, Jokic was a distant runner-up but extended his streak of top-two finishes to six consecutive ...

Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets prepares before Game 6 of their NBA Playoffs series against the Minnesota Timberwolves at the Target Center in Minneapolis on Thursday, April 30, 2026.

AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post/TNS

Two of the top three players in the NBA will face each other Monday. The other, according to MVP voters, will be watching from the couch.

Nuggets center Nikola Jokic finished in second place in the 2025-26 MVP vote, the league announced Sunday night. In what was widely regarded as a three-horse race, Jokic was a distant runner-up but extended his streak of top-two finishes to six consecutive years, joining Bill Russell and Larry Bird as the only players to do so.

Oklahoma City Thunder point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was crowned MVP for the second straight season. San Antonio Spurs phenom Victor Wembanyama, just 22 years old, placed third. He was also named Defensive Player of the Year last month. The Spurs and Thunder are set to compete in the Western Conference Finals starting Monday night.

The award is decided by a panel of 100 voters who cover the NBA and its teams for various local, national and international media outlets. Jokic appeared on all 100 ballots, earning 10 first-place votes and 48 second-place nods. He was third on 37 ballots, fourth on four, fifth on one.

Gilgeous-Alexander received the lion’s share of the first-place votes with 83. Wembanyama got five votes for first. Ballots are submitted before the playoffs begin, ensuring that only the regular season is taken into account — meaning that Denver’s first-round exit had no bearing on the tally this year.

Jokic averaged 27.7 points, 12.9 rebounds and 10.7 assists per game, marking the seventh time in NBA history that a player has averaged a triple-double. Jokic, Russell Westbrook and Oscar Robertson are the only players to accomplish the feat. Jokic has done it two seasons in a row.

He shot 56.9% from the field, 38% from 3-point range and 83.1% from the foul line, good for a 67% true shooting clip that ranked fifth in the league. At 66.5%, Gilgeous-Alexander was the only non-center to rank in the top eight. He averaged 31.1 points, 4.3 rebounds and 6.6 assists for the defending champion and first-place Thunder.

Jokic’s season was split in two parts by a knee injury he suffered on Dec. 29, 2025, in Miami. Before he limped off the court with a bone bruise, he was averaging 29.6 points on 67% shooting inside the arc and 43.5% shooting outside it. After he returned a month later, his scoring dropped to 25.8 points per game at a 60.3% clip from 2-point range and an inefficient 31.9% mark from deep.

His shooting splits were even worse in the playoffs — 55.3% from two, 19.4% from three as the Timberwolves eliminated Denver in six games. The Serbian big man struggled to contend with four-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert for most of the series. The Nuggets failed to advance to the second round for the first time since 2022.

Jokic has won three regular-season MVPs in his career, in addition to NBA Finals MVP in 2023 when he led Denver to its first championship. He’s eligible to sign a contract extension this summer.

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