When did the NBA start awarding Finals MVP?

The NBA Finals MVP award began in 1969, with Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers becoming the first winner.

How is the NBA Finals MVP decided?

The Finals MVP is voted by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters after the series, based on overall impact and performance.

Has a player from the losing team ever won Finals MVP?

Yes, Jerry West in 1969 is the only player to win Finals MVP while on the losing team.

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Nikola Jokić: Glory and Idol— A Superstar Who Wasn't Born From the Script

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NBA

9 views08/23/2026, 23:02 ET

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When Nikola Jokić lifted his first regular-season MVP trophy in 2021, a small tear was quietly opened in the NBA's template for what a superstar should look like. That year, he beat the explosively gifted Joel Embiid to become the first regular-season MVP in Denver Nuggets franchise history. What makes it more striking is that he did not come from America's basketball factories at all—he arrived from Pančevo, Serbia. A European big man whose scouting reports were littered with "too slow, too heavy, not athletic enough" ended up standing on top of the basketball world. The league had written a script for greatness, and he simply declined to read it.

Jokić's glory has carried an "anti-traditional" label from the very beginning. The MVP narrative in the NBA has long favored abrute-force aesthetics of flight and force: LeBron's fast-break dunks, Curry's deep threes, Giannis' relentless drives. Jokić's deadliest weapon, by contrast, is a guard's song sung at his own unhurried tempo—a hand-off bounce pass, a no-look feed behind the back, a delivery without looking. He never reshaped his body to fit the league's aesthetic; instead, he forced the league to rethink what greatness actually means. His three MVPs (2021, 2022, 2024) are, at heart, a ratification of a philosophy: efficiency, instinct, and team can defeat raw explosiveness. In a sport that worships the spectacular, he won by making the simple look inevitable.

As an international player, Jokić's significance reaches far beyond personal honors. He is another peak cultivated by European soil, following Dirk Nowitzki and the Gasol brothers, pushing the "Old Continent's" basketball intelligence to the very top of the league. For teenagers across Europe and the wider world, he proves a far more reachable path: you do not need historic leaping ability to become the best basketball player on the planet. This idol effect is quiet, yet remarkably durable—he makes no noise, yet he convinces. Where earlier idols sold aspiration through athletic impossibility, Jokić sells it through intelligence, and intelligence is something a kid can actually picture himself training.

In 2023, Jokić led the Nuggets to the franchise's first championship and was named Finals MVP. With glory piled upon him, he still smiled shyly in front of the cameras and pushed the credit toward his teammates. Perhaps that is his most "anti-traditional" trait: a superstar holding three MVPs who shows none of the usual "superstar behavior." He rarely seeks the microphone, rarely dramatizes the moment, and seems faintly puzzled by the machinery of fame built around him. And precisely because of who he is, he has become the most precious kind of basketball idol of this era—reminding us that greatness has never come in just one shape.

The tear he opened in the template has, by now, become a doorway. Through it walk a generation of players who look nothing like the old ideal, and who no longer feel they must. Jokić's glory is not a rebellion so much as a permission slip: the game is big enough for a thinker, a big man who passes, a star who would rather be home with his horses. That is the quietest kind of idol—one who expands the imagination of everyone watching, simply by being exactly himself.

And the reason his idol status endures is that it asks so little of the people who admire him. You do not need his wingspan or his vertical; you need only his patience and his eyes. In a culture of highlight-dependent fame, where idols are usually built from the impossible, Jokić is built from the attainable, and that makes him harder to replace than any dunker. The child in a small town anywhere on the map can watch him and think, "I could be smart like that." That thought—modest, durable, repeatable—is the real monument his five seasons of glory constructed. He did not just win an award. He widened the door, and left it open.