THE BEST FINALS MVPS OF THE LAST 10 YEARS

Now that the NBA season is officially over, we can get back to what we do best: Debating things we can never prove.

After an incredible run from Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets this year, it got me thinking. Where does Jokic’s run stack up against recent Finals MVPs?

While yes, the name of the award implies it’s simply a reflection of how the best player played in the Finals, the award is about more than the Finals. It’s also an acknowledgment of a player’s success throughout an entire post season run. Jokic was great in the finals, but one could argue (with relative ease) that it might’ve been his worst round of the entire playoffs.

With that all said, I decided to rank the Finals MVPs of the last 10 years in definitive order. I weighed four factors: Finals performance, overall playoff performance, team success, and difficulty of path to the Finals to come to my ultimate conclusion.

It got hard close to the top, but thankfully, there were two easy ones to get out of the way.

10. 2015 Andre Igoudala

This MVP, in hindsight, is an egregious mistake. Igoudala made some ENORMOUS plays for the Warriors, and it’s easy to say they wouldn’t have won the series without him, but Steph Curry should’ve won this award. Igoudala averaged 16 points in the series, while Steph led the Warriors with 26. Iggy did play his best game of the whole Finals in the final game, tallying 25 points and sealing the deal for the Dubs, but Finals MVP shouldn’t weigh too heavily on just one game, even if it is the series-ender. Steph averaged 18 more ppg throughout those playoffs than Iggy, and with Steph winning unanimous MVP the following season, it only looks worse as it continues to age. That said, we <3 Iggy.

9. 2014 Kawhi Leonard

Kawhi was not the best player in this series. That honor, undoubtedly, goes to LeBron James. The rest of the Miami Heat, however, failed to show up for this series. LeBron averaged 28. Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade combined to average 29. No one else on Miami broke 10. History will forget that the corpse of Greg Oden did play minutes in this series for Miami. Kawhi averaged 18 for the series, after finishing Games 1 and 2 with 9 points in each. The most shots he took in a single game was 13. He did finish shooting 62/58 in the series, but this was just a really, really weird year. In hindsight, the Spurs definitely stole a ring during a weird dip in talent in the league, before the Warriors fully emerged and before LeBron had retooled with a more talented team.

8. 2018 Kevin Durant

Okay, this is definitely a tier change now. That said, this MVP Durant doesn’t really sniff the other version. Part of what knocks him down, too, is the level of competition. The KD Warriors were so stacked, the idea of them losing without an injury was basically impossible. This team ran through a very bad Spurs team in round one (with an injured Kawhi on the sidelines), then handled a round 2 AD led Pelicans in 5, and ultimately overpowered an undermatched LeBron Cavs team. Really, the best moment from this KD run came in the Rockets WCF series, which the Warriors came VERY close to losing. KD averaged 30 points in that series on 46/40 shooting, including 34 and 5 threes in the deciding game 7. Overall just a boring year for the NBA with the expected champion being crowned.

7. 2020 LeBron James

This was a hard run to rank for a lot of reasons. The most obvious, of course, being the bubble. After Covid hit the world, the NBA went on an indefinite pause, returning for an abridged end of the season and playoffs in Walt Disney, Florida. The Lakers had been favorites all year, well before the pandemic, but the bubble still left a weird taste in everyone’s mouth. With the way the playoffs shook out too, and the Warriors out of the picture entirely, the Lakers ran through a weird time for the West, going 12-3 in 3 separate gentleman’s sweeps. LeBron was great throughout the run, but saved his best for the Finals, where he averaged 30/12/9 while shooting 59/42 from the field, proving too much for an overmatched and surprising opponent (now less so) in the Heat.

6. 2017 Kevin Durant

Now THIS Kevin Durant was a monster. The same Warriors caveats apply. They were the favorite. They were the world beaters. That said, this Cavs team was different. Kyrie was still on the team, and Love was healthy. It didn’t matter. For the first time since 2011, LeBron was in a Finals series where he wasn’t the best player. Durant averaged 35/8/5 in the series on 56/47 shooting. Literal video game numbers. The Warriors won in 5, and in a series with Steph Curry and LeBron James both playing, KD was by far the most unstoppable player on the floor for either team. The Warriors run to that Finals was less eventful, but in KD’s first opportunity to redeem himself against LeBron, he took full advantage. This was maybe the single best Finals performance, excluding the wider playoffs and additional context, of any one player in the past decade.

5. 2021 Giannis Antetokounmpo

This is where things get the most murky, in my opinion. This is where the list gets crowded with guys who were not the heavy favorites to win going into the season, and all had enormous performances to carry their team to victory. The reason Giannis comes in last among that group for me is two-fold. One is the path for his team. The Bucks benefitted greatly from how the playoffs shook out. The Nets had been the heavy favorites going into the year, and were up 2-0 on the Bucks after a 40 point blowout in game 2. But James Harden was hurt for that series, and Kyrie followed him to the bench after an injury in game 4. Giannis led the Bucks back, ultimately stealing the series after the infamous KD toe-shot, and the Bucks cruised to the Finals from there. Their opponent, the Suns, got the benefit of the injury too, facing the Lakers without AD, the Nuggets without Murray, and the Clippers without Kawhi. Giannis was still awesome throughout the run and the Finals specifically, tallying 35/15/5 against the Suns on 62% shooting, but still. This run, of all of them, falls the flattest for me in hindsight.

4. 2019 Kawhi Leonard

Few players legacy seems to benefit more from a single Finals run than Kawhi does from this run. And while Kawhi was great in those Finals, it’s really about the two rounds before that make this run so special. The Raptors cleaned the floor with the Magic in round one, but then immediately found themselves in a seven game series against the Sixers in the following round. Kawhi was insane in that series, scoring over 30 in 5/7 games (29 in another), finishing the series averaging 35/10/4 on 53% shooting. He also hit one of the most famous shots in recent NBA playoff memory, falling away in the right corner, sending Embiid off literally crying. He followed that performance up with a 30/10/4 series win in six against the MVP, Giannis, and the Bucks. He was still great against the Warriors too, but that series was dramatically affected by injury. The second round against the Sixers, though, is one of the best from any player over the last 10 years.

3. 2022 Steph Curry

This run is almost the antithesis to the argument the Kawhi run made. While Kawhi was great leading into the finals, only to relatively end on a low note, Steph unquestionably ended on a high note. The Warriors did benefit from some great matchups amid a down year from the West overall, beating the Nuggets without Murray in R1, the Grizzlies without Ja in R2, and ultimately the Mavericks in R3 after Luka shocked Phoenix (and the world). That all said, the Warriors were definitely not the Warriors of old. Between Klay still finding his legs back, and Draymond losing his offensive scoring threat, Steph truly had to do it all for the Warriors. After scoring 34, 29, and 31 through the first three games, the Warriors still found themselves down 2-1 to what most people would agree was the better Boston roster. Then, Steph had Game 4. In Boston. 43 points, 10 rebounds, 4 assists, and 7 made threes. Boston did everything they could to stop him and nothing worked. Steph completely changed the direction of the series, and Boston’s confidence shattered. The Warriors ended up winning three straight and closing it out in Boston, where Steph finished with his fourth performance of 29 points or more and at least 6 made threes. Boston’s roster was better, but Steph was the best player in the series, and it wasn’t close.

2. 2023 Nikola Jokic

It’s hard not to overreact to the things we most recently saw, but Nikola Jokic’s run this season is truly one of THE most impressive playoff performance’s of all time, let alone the last decade. For starters, while it’s impossible to prove, I think the Nuggets beat the second and third best teams in the playoffs in rounds two and three of this run. Phoenix and LA were both very good teams, and it took ALL TIME performances from Booker and KD to sneak the only two wins of that group. Jokic averaged 35/13/10 against Phoenix, 28/15/12 against LA, and a pedestrian 30/14/7 against Miami to finish the job. For the entire playoffs, he was 30/14/10 on 55/46. Like those are video game numbers. People don’t average triple doubles on shooting numbers like that unless their name is LeBron James, and even he hasn’t hit marks like that consistently. Jokic was the best player in the regular season, and EASILY the best player in the playoffs. If anything, 2 might be too low, if it weren’t for…

1. 2016 LeBron James

Honestly, there’s not much to say. The LeBron led Cavs faced off against the winningest team in NBA history, the 73-9 Warriors, and left with the first 3-1 comeback in NBA history and the W. While the Kyrie shot is famous, and the Cavs don’t win without it, let’s not pretend like this series came down to anything other than LeBron James being the best player in basketball at the time. LeBron finished the series averaging 30/11/9 on 49/37 shooting, scoring 40 in back to back elimination games to force game 7. 82 points, 24 rebounds, 18 assists, and 3 combined turnovers in those 2 games. Pretty good. This is maybe the most revered Finals win in NBA history, given the context of the Warriors season, and while the Cavs had been the favorites in the East throughout the year, the win still to this day feels impossible. This is the unquestionable #1 answer, and I won’t hear otherwise.