Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid are back at the front of the MVP race, battling it out for basketball's highest individual honor for the third straight season. Unlike the past two years, though, the Philadelphia 76ers superstar forcefully out-dueled his Denver Nuggets counterpart in front of a national audience last week, leading his squad to a comeback victory over the top team in the West by dropping 47 points, 18 rebounds and five assists.
Embiid's epic performance will no doubt influence some voters when it comes time to place their tallies for MVP. Why? The overwhelming physical dominance he put forth not just against Denver, but has pretty much every time he's taken the floor in 2022-23—a factor that separates him from Jokic in the eyes of Utah Jazz veteran Rudy Gay.
“It's hard. You can't be mad at them giving [Jokic] the back-to-back MVPs because what he brings to the team. That man is the driving force behind that team. Embiid is, too, but in a different way,” Gay explained on his podcast, Speakeasy. “He's not gonna fill up the stat sheets besides rebounding and scoring, right? I mean, every now and then he can make a play, but he's not known for it. Where Jokic, he's more of a playmaker than he is a scorer. He's also a really good scorer, too. He's their point guard, he's literally their point guard. He's the reason they're able to start the way they do. He's like an elevated Draymond, you know what I'm sayin'?”
Is Embiid the most dominant player in the league? Or is it Jokic?@RudyGay & @D_Fergo pick a side pic.twitter.com/lvk27QcHqu
— Bleav (@BleavNetwork) February 2, 2023
What makes the indirect rivalry between Jokic and Embiid so fascinating is the drastically disparate ways they impact the game.
Jokic is probably the league's best passer, an all-encompassing, hyper-efficient scoring and playmaking fulcrum who's led Denver to basketball's most efficient offense this season. Embiid is more built from the cloth of other Hall-of-Fame centers before him, combining unreal size and dexterity with the ball skills of a forward to emerge as perhaps basketball's most unstoppable scorer. He's definitely a more imposing, effective defensive presence than Jokic, but on-off data makes clear the Nuggets' franchise player isn't the abject liability he once was on that end.
There's no concrete rubric for voters, or anyone else, to decide league MVP. But when it comes to the classic definition of “dominant” NBA big men, that description applies to Joel Embiid more than Nikola Jokic.
“But we're talking dominance? It's Embiid, man,” Gay said. “He's the most dominant player we have in our game right now.”
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