How Jaylen Brown Could Have Only One Player To Compete With In NBA MVP Race

Boston Celtics legend Paul Pierce recently said that Jaylen Brown is his current NBA MVP runner-up, behind only Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

It turns out that “The Truth” may be onto something.

NBA senior writer John Hollinger of The Athletic said on Tuesday that due to the league’s rule that players must appear in at least 65 games to be eligible for end-of-season awards, Brown and SGA could end up being the only two legitimate candidates for the hardware.

The Celtics guard has suited up for 33 of the team’s first 35 contests this season while playing at an MVP level and Gilgeous-Alexander has missed just one of the Thunder’s 37 games thus far. Even without the 65-game rule, the reigning NBA MVP would be a frontrunner for the award again.

Former MVPs (and otherwise top contenders) like Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets and Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks, meanwhile, are in serious danger of falling short of the threshold this year due to injuries.

Jokic is currently sidelined due to a knee issue, has missed Denver’s last four tilts and has no clear timeline for return.

Antetokounmpo was out for most of December and has been limited to 22 games this season.

The list also includes San Antonio Spurs big man Victor Wembanyama (among others), who’s sat out 14 contests already.

“But rather, it’s an entry point to a discussion about the unintended consequences of the league’s 65-game rule and whether it will essentially leave us with only two players standing — Brown and Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — in what otherwise would be an epic NBA MVP race,” Hollinger said. “Normally, Brown’s play might naturally lead us toward a quality vs. quantity argument about the merits of whether his playing a full season at this level was more valuable than somebody like Nikola Jokić playing roughly three-quarters of a record-smashing season for Denver. Even if Gilgeous-Alexander ultimately topped both of them, we would have spirited discussions about second and third, and further down the ballot, about the All-NBA spots regarding Jokić and several other elite players who have missed time.”

Brown is certainly deserving of his fifth All-Star honor in six seasons, but would he really finish ahead of Jokic, Antetokounmpo and Wembanyama if all four players were fully healthy?

“The 65-game requirement added to the 2023 collective bargaining agreement came as a response to load management, but actual, honest-to-goodness injuries threaten to make a mockery of it by leaving several of the league’s best players just a few games short of the threshold,” Hollinger wrote. “Sure, maybe Joker and Wemby still get to 65, and everything turns out fine, but inevitably, one of these years it won’t work out as neatly. The whole point of having people vote on the awards is to let them decide how many games are enough and how much impact a Nikola Jokić needs to make to outrank a Jaylen Brown while playing fewer games. We’ve lost that, and I’d argue it was a bad trade.”