Finals MVP vs Regular Season MVP: Key Differences

What each award actually measures

• Regular-season MVP: rewards the best player across the full 82-game regular season — sustained excellence and team success over months.
• Finals MVP (FMVP): looks only at the Finals series (four to seven games) and asks who decided the sport's biggest stage.

One is a marathon, the other the final hundred metres. The gap in sample size is why the two cannot be converted into a single scale of difficulty.

Voters and timing

	Regular-season MVP	Finals MVP
Scope	Entire regular season	Finals series only
Voters	A much larger media panel	About 11 media members
Timing	After the regular season	Immediately after the final game
Team success	Strongly weighted	Almost always the champion

FMVP uses a small panel voting under time pressure. Two things follow: every single ballot carries enormous weight, and memorable clutch moments are amplified. That is how you get counter-intuitive results like Jerry West winning from the losing side in 1969, or Andre Iguodala winning as a bench player in 2015.

Which one is worth more?

Strictly speaking they are not comparable, because they measure different abilities:

• The regular-season MVP proves you can dominate over a long season — availability, consistency and carrying a team all at once.
• The Finals MVP proves you can take over under maximum pressure, but it covers only a handful of games, so variance is much higher.

A player can easily win one without the other. In 2024, for example, Nikola Jokić won regular-season MVP while Jaylen Brown of the Celtics took Finals MVP — not even on the same team.

How hard is the same-season double?

Since the Finals MVP was created in 1969, the same player has swept both awards in a single season 16 times, which shows how rare it is:

• Michael Jordan: four times (1991, 1992, 1996, 1998), the most ever.
• LeBron James: twice (2012, 2013).
• Larry Bird: twice (1984, 1986).
• Most recent: 2025, when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander led the Thunder to the title and swept both awards.

In the last decade the two awards have usually gone to different players — evidence that "best over a season" and "best in the Finals" increasingly land on different people.

Use the related hubs above to browse the all-time Finals MVP list, the voting rules and the 2026 winner.