Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is officially a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player. The Oklahoma City Thunder guard, fresh off leading his team to the Western Conference Finals, was confirmed as the 2025-26 MVP after a regular season the league's voters refused to split hairs over.
On The Game Theory Podcast, host Sam Vecenie and co-host Bryce Simon broke down a result that, in their reading, was the most defensible MVP call of the modern era.
"Feels right," Vecenie said. "When we did our end of season awards, both you and I had Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as the MVP. You can say he's the best player on the best team."
The vote was a near-landslide. Gilgeous-Alexander collected 83 first-place votes from a 100-ballot field. Nikola Jokic was a distant second with 10 first-place votes, while San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama gathered five and Detroit's Cade Cunningham collected two. Wembanyama and Jokic split the lower rungs of the ballot, with Luka Doncic the consensus choice at number four.
For Vecenie, the bigger story is what the award places SGA next to in the historical record. The Thunder star now stands alongside Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, LeBron James, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Karl Malone, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird as players who have won at least two MVP awards in the last four decades.
"I think that it's completely reasonable," Vecenie said of placing SGA in that company. "If they win another title this year, he'll have been the best player on two NBA title teams as well. Two MVPs, best player on two NBA title teams. You really start to weed out — like, it's Stephen Curry that applies to, LeBron that applies to, Tim Duncan that applies to, Jordan, Magic, LeBron or Bird that would apply to. It starts to get into a range where we really, really, really are getting to an elite level with Shay, where I think we're talking that this is a top 25 player of all time if the career ends right now probably."
Simon's case was simpler. The numbers, he argued, do not require defending.
"His job is to win games, do so efficiently, put the ball in the basket, etc.," Simon said. "How he goes about that, whether it's aesthetically pleasing or whatever, just quite frankly doesn't matter to me when it comes to evaluating his impact on winning basketball and being an MVP. He gets the job done and he provides a real value on the defensive end."
The Thunder finished the regular season as the best defensive team in the league, and Vecenie was quick to argue SGA's contribution there is undersold in the slipstream of Wembanyama's Defensive Player of the Year campaign. The Game Theory hosts both ranked SGA above the field of Jokic, Wembanyama, Doncic and Cunningham on their personal end-of-season ballots — a result almost identical to how the actual league vote landed.
Vecenie also offered a pre-emptive note for the playoff series now underway between Oklahoma City and San Antonio. The MVP is a regular-season award, he reminded listeners, and the conference finals matchup should not be allowed to retroactively rewrite a vote that has already been cast.
"It's possible the Spurs win this series. It's possible that Victor Wembanyama looks like the best player in this series that starts on Monday," Vecenie said. "This is a regular season award. The voters, you take the regular season and you vote on that. You don't project out what happens in the playoffs or who's better equipped for the playoffs or anything like that."
For a 27-year-old guard already holding two MVP trophies and chasing a second straight Finals run, the bigger question is what comes next. Vecenie's answer was unambiguous.
"It's a great position for him and the Oklahoma City Thunder to be in."
