Are Giannis Antetokounmpo's MVP days behind him?

Yahoo

27-02-2025

There's one player in NBA history who has averaged more than 30 points, 10 rebounds and five assists per game while making more than 60% of his shots. He did it last season, and he's doing it again this season.
He plays Thursday night, in a marquee matchup between two of just 11 players ever with multiple Most Valuable Player trophies and an NBA Finals MVP on their mantels.
He's the one who enters that nationally televised tilt with basically no shot at winning MVP again this season.
'At this point in my career, I had the conversation with my brother — I was like, 'Man, it's crazy to me,'' Giannis Antetokounmpo told Yahoo Sports senior NBA reporter Vincent Goodwill back in December. 'I had just come to a realization that I might never win another MVP.'
This is where Antetokounmpo now finds himself, 12 years into his career, at age 30: in the unenviable position of chasing not only monstrously productive peers, but his own ghost. How did he get here? How did we get here?
Even now, the sheer tonnage of Antetokounmpo's production remains staggering. He enters Thursday second in the NBA in scoring, sixth in rebounding and eighth in field goal percentage, with a usage rate nearly twice as high as any of the seven players ahead of him. He's 18th in the NBA in points created by assist, too, with his dimes producing more buckets than point guards like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Maxey; of the 193 players who've logged at least 1,000 minutes this season, only Chris Paul and Utah rookie Isaiah Collier have created more 3-pointers per 100 possessions than Giannis, according to PBP Stats.
Open the aperture out to consider more advanced statistics, and Antetokounmpo still shines. He sits third in the NBA this season in value over replacement player, player efficiency rating, box plus-minus and Kostya Medvedovsky's DARKO skill projections; fifth in The BBall Index's LEBRON metric and Neil Paine's Estimated RAPTOR; tied for sixth in estimated plus-minus; eighth in ESPN's wins above replacement; and ninth in win shares per 48 minutes.
His best game remains as good as anyone else's, if not better. Of all individual performances during the 2024-25 NBA season, the highest Game Score — a stat developed to offer a 'rough measure of a player's productivity for a single game,' akin to a one-off PER — belongs to Giannis' 59-point, 14-rebound, seven-assist, three-block, two-steal tour de force against the Pistons back in November:
While sober statistical analysis suggests he's not quite as overwhelming as he was during his peak — the back-to-back MVP seasons in 2018-19 and '19-'20, the 2021 NBA Finals run — Antetokounmpo remains as devastating as ever in discrete doses, like that night against Detroit or the NBA Cup final against the Thunder. He's more multifaceted now, too, having traded his experiments with 3-point shooting in for a more effective midrange game, feasting on a steadier-than-ever diet of touches at the elbows and on the low block, and continually refining his work as a playmaker, with his highest assist rate in five years and his lowest turnover rate in seven.
'I'm having better years than the years I won it,' Antetokounmpo told Goodwill.
And yet:
'But hey,' he continued. 'The league is improving. Guys are playing very, very well.'
For all the top-threes, top-fives and top-whatevers on Antetokounmpo's present-tense statistical résumé, where he doesn't land in those reckonings is at, or immediately beneath, the top. For the first three years following Giannis' second MVP run, those spots were virtually always occupied by either Joel Embiid or Nikola Jokić, with whom Antetokounmpo will square off on Thursday. Over the last two, they've belonged to either Jokić or Gilgeous-Alexander.
Antetokounmpo isn't the only one whose production is historic. Jokić is in the midst of what might be the most impressive offensive season of all time and on pace to become just the third player ever to average a triple-double. Gilgeous-Alexander is legitimately putting up Jordan-level numbers on Steph-level shooting efficiency.
SGA's doing all that for a Thunder team that leads the West by nine games and currently boasts the highest average margin of victory in NBA history. Jokić has carried the Nuggets to a tie for the West's No. 2 seed, a record five and a half games better than Milwaukee's and a net rating more than four points per 100 possessions higher than that of a Bucks team that's a good-but-not-great 11th in offensive efficiency, 13th in defensive efficiency and 15th in net rating, per Cleaning the Glass, with the least efficient fourth-quarter offense in the NBA.
They've also done it while playing more games and several hundred more minutes than Antetokounmpo, who missed the Bucks' final six contests before the All-Star break plus the All-Star Game itself with a left calf strain. That's the same type of injury that kept him out of Milwaukee's brief 2024 playoff appearance, continuing a string of springtime disappointment that has seen him play just 15 postseason games since winning the 2021 championship — a fallow run that has led Bucks brass to make major moves like swapping Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard and, just weeks ago, shipping out Khris Middleton for Kyle Kuzma.
'Giannis is very aware that he hasn't played the last two years in the playoffs,' Bucks coach Doc Rivers said of the decision to hold Antetokounmpo out before the All-Star break. 'And that is very important to him."
Crank out all-time stat lines for bona fide contenders while lining it up every night, and you're probably headed for the top of the ballot. Do it for a team that's trying to fight off the scorching Detroit Pistons for fifth place, and while flirting with missing the 65-game threshold for awards eligibility, and you might get glossed over — especially when your team is 8-14 against teams with .500-or-better records, 2-12 against teams with top-10 net ratings, and a combined 0-11 against the top three seeds in the East and top two teams out West. (Thursday will mark the Bucks' first look at Denver this season.)
There's context for all of those numbers, of course. Six of the losses to elite opponents came amid the Bucks' awful 2-8 start, when the team seemed adrift and bereft of an identity on either end of the floor. Several were tightly contested one- or two-possession affairs, including a pair of early-season losses to Cleveland — one of which came with Giannis out of the lineup.
And … well, they're not really 0-fer against the top teams in the West, are they?
That guy — the one who folded a historically excellent Thunder team like laundry, who needed all of two and a half quarters to make straw-poll voters start begging Tim Bontemps to change their picks — is still there. He's there even in reduced, restricted minutes as he works his way back from the calf issue: On Tuesday, against the Rockets' snarling, No. 3-ranked defense, he repeatedly battering-rammed his way into the paint, playing through hand-swipes and horse collars to finish with 27 points, 10 rebounds, six assists and one turnover.
The Bucks won Giannis' 32 minutes against Houston; they lost the 16 he sat. He pulled off multiple monster plays in the clutch: picking Jalen Green's pocket and diving on the loose ball to secure possession, recovering to pin a Tari Eason layup against the backboard and keep it a one-point game, not only winning a jump ball with 3.7 seconds to go but tipping it perfectly to Lillard to give him a chance for a game-tying 3. The Bucks couldn't cash in on their late-game opportunities, though — a heroic effort hamstrung by a ho-hum finish, destined to be discarded from all memory. Just another one in an endless list of the sort of big Giannis games to which we've become accustomed.
'I think maybe at times, it gets a little bit frustrating because I compete. I do. I do. I improve,' Antetokounmpo told Eric Nehm of The Athletic earlier this season. 'And I don't get the recognition, I believe, sometimes as much as I should, which sometimes is frustrating. I'm like, am I doing my job? And then I look, I'm like, 'Yeah, you're doing your job. You're improving. You're putting the work in.' Like, I really believe I'm the most consistent player in the league.'
There are downsides to consistency: to how sustained exposure to remarkable things can render them unremarkable, to how the expectation of 98th or 99th percentile work can leave you inured to the fact that it's extremely hard to produce 98th or 99th percentile work. Hit that level in the right game at the right moment, though, and it can offer an awfully sharp shock to the system.
Antetokounmpo might not win another MVP. Treat Jokić and the Nuggets the way he treated SGA and the Thunder, though — outshine both favorites with the world watching — and it might wake the glossing-over populace up to what they've been taking for granted, reminding them that Antetokounmpo's best game is good as anyone's ever has been, and that, when the games matter most, there might not be anyone in the world you'd rather have.