On a random Wednesday night in early April, with the NBA season winding down and Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic closing in on what will be his third MVP Award in four years, former NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas decided to fire off a misguided hot take like it was a heavily contested three-ball way back in 2006. While discussing the state of the 2023-24 MVP race with NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe on The Nightcap Show, Arenas had this to say about the two MVP Awards that Jokic has already won:

Now while I say that this critique of Jokic is misguided, it's certainly not one that is unexpected. Despite the fact that the face of the NBA is sitting right in front of us, casually putting together one of the most remarkable multi-season runs in NBA history, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who is giving Nikola Jokic the credit he deserves. As the kids nowadays say, we oughta be giving The Joker his flowers, but instead, Gilbert Arenas is coming in with a goddamn firehose and ruining the garden that we're supposed to pick the flowers out of. And he's not the only former player or member of the NBA media who is guilty of this.

After stating that Jokic is “statistically, when it comes to overall game, the worst MVP winner of the last forty years,” Arenas went on to talk about how the guys who won the MVP whose teams didn't have either the best or second best record in the league did something historic during their MVP seasons. Arenas cited Michael Jordan's 1988 MVP season, in which he averaged 35 points, 6 assists, 5 rebounds and 3 steals per game for a Bulls team that finished with the 7th-best record in the NBA, and Russell Westbrook's 2017 MVP season, where he won the award despite the Thunder having the 10th-best record in the league largely because he became the first player to average a triple double for a full season since Oscar Robertson did so over 50 years earlier.

Now on one hand, Gil isn't wrong when he claims that these MVP seasons were historic, but determining whether or not something is “historic” is really all about the narrative of the event in question. MJ's narrative had been methodically crafted and cared for ever since he came into the league as arguably the most dynamic rookie guard in league history. To this day, it remains bulletproof, so to speak. The Westbrook narrative in 2017 was just as easy to identify… after Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City for Golden State in the summer of 2016, the entirety of the offensive workload was left to be handled by Westbrook, who did literally all he could to carry the Thunder to 47 wins. “All he could do” included averaging a triple-double. But again, we're talking about narratives here.

What if Russell Westbrook averaged 31 points, 9 rebounds and 9 assists per game instead of 31-10-10? If Westbrook came up one rebound and one assist shy of averaging a triple double, would the narrative have still been in his favor, or would that have been enough to ensure that James Harden — who averaged 29 points, 8 rebounds and 11 assists per game for a 55-win Houston Rockets team — won the MVP instead of Westbrook? In the end, crafting a narrative around numbers is a silly game to play if you aren't willing to look at everything available.

Gilbert Arenas claimed that there was nothing special or historic about Nikola Jokic averaging 26 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists per game in 2021, or 27 points, 13 rebounds and 8 assists in 2022. He went on to say that Jokic won the MVP those two seasons because he almost averaged a triple double, and that, as a narrative, makes him an undeserving MVP. But this just shows laziness on the part of Gilbert Arenas or whoever it was that was accumulating those stats for him, because here's what Arenas failed to consider in each of those two seasons:

2021 – Jokic record 16 triple doubles, which were the most by a center in a single season in NBA history at that point in time… The Nuggets were 6.4 points per 100 possessions better with Jokic on the floor than when he was off… Jokic became just the second player in league history to win MVP in a season averaging at least 25 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists per game. 2016-17 Westbrook was the other, but Westbrook shot 43 percent from the field and his team won 57 percent of their games. Jokic shot 56 percent from the field and his team won 65 percent of their games… Jokic played in all 72 games.

2022 – Jokic recorded 19 triple doubles which broke the record he set the previous season for most triple doubles in a season by a center… The Nuggets were an astounding 16.4 points per 100 possessions better with Jokic on the floor than off… Jokic became the only player in NBA history with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists in the same season, and the only player to average 27 points, 13 rebounds and 7 assists per game in a season. And before anyone says, “Well, Sonny, you're just hand-picking stats now,” I'm compelled to ask, What the hell are we doing with triple doubles? … Highest PER in the history of the league

(SIDE NOTE: When this season ends, Jokic will have four of the twenty best PER seasons in NBA history — Michael Jordan (4 times), LeBron James (3 times), Wilt Chamberlain (3 times), Giannis Antetokounmpo (3 times), Joel Embiid (2 times), and Stephen Curry (1 time) are the other players in the top twenty).

Of course, Arenas' critique of Jokic also ignores what should be a vital piece, arguably the most important piece, of the MVP voting criteria… the eye test. Watch the games and really pay attention, and you'll see that Jokic impacts winning in more ways on a more consistent basis than anyone else in the league. Need him to go out there and grab you 20 boards? He can do it. Need him to go head to head with the opponent's go-to-guy and get you 40 points, scoring every big bucket down the stretch? Yeah, that's not gonna be a problem. Need someone to facilitate the offense and take only ten shots in an entire game? He can do that too, and he'd probably prefer to play this way. Jokic is scheme-proof and utterly undeniable. You just need to allow yourself to see it.