Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Wins Second Straight MVP With 83 of 100 First-Place Votes

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander collected 83 of 100 first-place votes for the 2025-26 Kia Most Valuable Player award on Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard’s second straight MVP and the league’s 14th instance of a player winning the trophy in consecutive seasons. Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, a three-time winner, took 10 first-place votes. San Antonio Spurs forward-center Victor Wembanyama, the season’s runaway Defensive Player of the Year, took five.

The headline number sits next to a quieter one. Gilgeous-Alexander’s per-36-minute scoring dipped by less than a point from his first MVP year, to 33.7 from 34.4, while his shooting climbed from .519 to .553 and his three-point percentage rose from .375 to .386. He attempted fewer shots and converted more of them. That is the trajectory the historical cohort he just joined tends to follow, and it is the part of the season that says the Thunder are not done shopping for hardware.

The Vote Was Not Close

The award gap matched the team gap. Oklahoma City finished the regular season 64-18 to claim the top seed in the Western Conference, four wins off last season’s 68-win pace yet still ahead of every other roster in the league. The Spurs pushed for the top seed into late spring, with Wembanyama posting a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year campaign that put real pressure on the ballot’s MVP slot.

• 83 first-place MVP votes for Gilgeous-Alexander, out of 100 ballots cast by a global panel of broadcasters and writers
• 10 for Jokic, who finished second; five for Wembanyama, who finished third
• 14th player in NBA history to win MVP in back-to-back seasons
• Seven back-to-back winners this century; the prior one was Jokic in 2021 and 2022

That spread is wider than the margins for two of the last four repeat MVPs and roughly matches the gap when Jokic claimed his second straight Maurice Podoloff Trophy four years ago. Vote share is not the only test of an MVP season, but a runaway ballot is the cleanest proxy for what voters saw: the same player carrying a different team toward the same kind of finish.

Sunday at the Podium

Thunder chairman Clay Bennett, general manager Sam Presti, and head coach Mark Daigneault sat in the front row of Sunday’s news conference. Gilgeous-Alexander’s wife Hailey and son Ares joined them. His father Vaughn was there. So was his cousin Nickeil Alexander-Walker, currently a guard with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

His Thunder teammates lined up on the dais behind him in matching Burberry trench coats and Audemars Piguet watches, gifts he handed out the morning of the announcement. He noted that the coats fit every player except 7-foot-1 center Chet Holmgren, whose version is being tailored. The full gift package roughly doubled the value of last year’s lot, which clutched in near $21,000 per teammate.

The inner circle is something people forget about. I get all the praise and people forget, I’m on the court for 2 1/2 hours every night and the rest of my days, you guys make my life seem this easy.

Said Gilgeous-Alexander, addressing his teammates from the podium during Sunday’s MVP news conference in Oklahoma City. He thanked Bennett, Presti, and Daigneault by name, then the fans, then the city that absorbed him in the 2019 trade that brought him from the Los Angeles Clippers.

The Stat Line That Beat Last Year’s Stat Line

The 27-year-old guard averaged 31.1 points, 6.6 assists, and shot 55.3% from the floor across 76 regular-season appearances. That is the third-highest scoring average of his career and the highest field-goal percentage. His free-throw rate landed at .879, the third-best mark he has posted, and his three-point clip of 38.6% was his second-best.

His efficiency curve is the part of this season that separates it from the prior MVP run. The volume came down a touch. The conversion went up across the board. Voters notice that pattern; it is the same one Jokic rode through three MVP wins and the one Stephen Curry rode through the unanimous 2015-16 ballot.

What Rose, What Held, What Fell

• Field-goal percentage climbed from .519 to .553, a career best
• Three-point percentage climbed from .375 to .386
• Assists per 36 minutes climbed from 6.7 to 7.1
• Per-36 scoring eased from 34.4 to 33.7, his volume managed down by Daigneault’s rotations
• Turnovers held at 2.2 per game, with seven games of 30-plus points and zero turnovers, tied for second-most in a season

The Streak Voters Could Not Ignore

Gilgeous-Alexander scored 20 or more points in every game he played this season, extending his streak to an NBA-record 140 consecutive games with at least 20 points. He opened the year with 35 points in a double-overtime win against Houston, then dropped a career-high 55 in a double-overtime win against the Indiana Pacers two nights later. The Thunder became the first team in league history to play double overtime in their first two games. By the time the team hit 22-1, he was averaging 32.8 points on 55.6% shooting across those 23 contests.

Joining Jordan and Chamberlain in a Two-Man Room

The cleanest line in his second MVP season is the company he keeps on a specific efficiency floor. Only Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain had previously averaged at least 30 points while shooting at least 50% from the field in four straight seasons. Gilgeous-Alexander is the third name on that list and the first guard. He is also the first guard ever to average 30-plus points and shoot 55% or better from the floor in a single season.

The Jordan parallel goes further. Sunday’s announcement made Gilgeous-Alexander the second player in league history to score 30 or more per game and average fewer than 2.5 turnovers per game for three consecutive seasons. Jordan, again, is the other. He led the league in plus-minus at plus-788 and added Clutch Player of the Year honors to the MVP plate. The Thunder were 9-1 in games decided by five points or fewer when he was on the floor in the final minutes.

Fourteen Names, Seven Since 2000

Sunday’s vote moves the back-to-back MVP roster from 13 to 14 names. Seven of those names belong to players whose repeat seasons came after 2000. The pattern across decades is consistent: repeat winners tend to play for organizations that win 60-plus games in both seasons and tend to convert at least one of those years into a championship within a two-year window. Gilgeous-Alexander already has the championship, won last June against the Pacers. The repeat 60-win seasons are the new line on the resume.

The Modern Cohort

Below is the post-2000 portion of the list. The age column matters: most modern repeats happen in a player’s late twenties or early thirties, and most are anchored to coaches who have run the same system for at least three seasons before the second trophy lands.

The Pre-2000 Anchors

The earlier names on the back-to-back list run deeper into NBA history: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Jordan. Six of those seven won at least one championship inside their repeat window. The pattern is older than the modern playoff format, and it has held through six decades of rule changes.

The Thunder Machine That Made It Easy

Gilgeous-Alexander’s repeat happened inside the same organizational frame that produced last June’s banner. Presti drafted Holmgren, traded for Alex Caruso, signed Isaiah Hartenstein, and built around a defense that ranked first in the league for the second straight season. Daigneault’s rotations again leaned on a 10-deep group that limited the lead guard’s minutes load. Bennett’s ownership has kept the front office stable since 2008. Few organizations in the league have run that long without a coach or GM change.

That continuity matters for the historical-cohort math. Of the prior 13 back-to-back MVP winners, 11 played for a head coach who had been in place for at least three full seasons by the second trophy year. Daigneault is in his fifth.

The roster around the MVP is also worth pricing. Holmgren posted 6.4 wins added by box plus-minus calculations. Jalen Williams continued to look like a top-15 player. Cason Wallace and Caruso anchored a perimeter defense that suffocated even the league’s best halfcourt offenses. None of those four are unrestricted free agents this summer.

Earlier this season, Gilgeous-Alexander put 41 on the defending West runner-up in a road blowout of Denver that ended the Nuggets’ six-game win streak, the kind of statement night voters cited on their ballots through the spring.

What Repeat MVP Seasons Have Looked Like Next

The historical pattern divides cleanly. Repeat MVPs who went on to a third straight trophy: Russell (three in a row, twice), Chamberlain, Bird, and Jokic missed his by one season. Repeat MVPs who did not three-peat: Magic Johnson, Malone, Duncan, Nash, James in both runs, Curry, and Antetokounmpo. The probability of a third straight has historically run below 30%, even for players whose repeat-year team won 60-plus.

That said, no prior repeat MVP entered the third year with a defending championship, a returning rotation, and a head coach in his fifth season at age 27. The structural conditions around the Thunder are unusually friendly. The MVP race for 2026-27 starts, on opening night, with Gilgeous-Alexander as the price-implied favorite by a wider margin than any back-to-back winner in 20 years. The reason MVP race coverage has spent five seasons being reshaped, as we have tracked across previous award cycles, is that injury luck and roster volatility do more to set the ballot than anyone expects. The Thunder, as of Sunday, have neither problem.

If Gilgeous-Alexander stays healthy and the rotation around him stays together, the third trophy is a live conversation. If either of those breaks, the historical odds say a third MVP almost never happens. Both possibilities are on the table; the season opens in October.