How Jokić’s 2024 Season Stacks Up Against the Greatest Statistical Years in NBA History

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Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokić, who has won three of the NBA’s past four MVP awards, is enjoying the best statistical season of his career. He is on pace to become the first center to average a triple-double and the first player ever to rank top 10 in points, rebounds, assists and steals per game in the same season.

“Obviously,” Jokić said last month, “I think I’m playing the best basketball of my life.”

It is the sort of season that will force the MVP voting panel to reckon with possible fatigue. Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the biggest threat to Jokić joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and LeBron James as the sixth player to win a fourth MVP. (BetMGM has Gilgeous-Alexander as a massive -3000 favorite over Jokić for the honor.)

There is little statistical argument for Gilgeous-Alexander, whose 32.7 points per game lead the league. SGA is scoring far less efficiently than Jokić while averaging significantly fewer assists and rebounds.

It is wild that Gilgeous-Alexander’s statistics, which mark the 24th-best Player Efficiency Rating in NBA history (30.7), per Basketball Reference, pale in comparison. But Jokić’s PER (32.2) is the second-highest ever, trailing only his own 2021-22 campaign (32.9), when he won his second consecutive MVP award.

Which begs the question: Is Nikola Jokić enjoying the greatest statistical regular season in history?

We searched far and wide — sorting through the most impressive advanced statistical campaigns of the best players in NBA history — to find the other greatest statistical regular seasons ever and narrowed the list to six: Chamberlain’s 1961-62 season, Jordan’s 1987-88 season, James’ 2008-09 season, Stephen Curry’s 2015-16 season, Giannis Antetokounmpo’s 2021-22 season and Joel Embiid’s 2022-23 season.

That list covers a lot of ground. It crosses every positional group (guards, swings and bigs) twice. It is, perhaps, overrepresented by the modern era, though the current style of play in the 3-point era — high usage, high efficiency and fast pace — is a breeding ground for incredibly productive statistical seasons.

To wit, Jokić, Chamberlain, Antetokounmpo, Jordan, James, Curry and Embiid have combined to produce 22 of the 24 highest single-season PERs in history. Gilgeous-Alexander and Anthony Davis are the only other players to crack that list. And those aforementioned seasons represent each player’s highest PER.

We understand that advanced statistics are not an exact science. We should also not discredit a statistic that yielded the two seasons that immediately jump to mind when we are discussing history’s greatest — the campaigns in which Chamberlain averaged 50 points per game and Jordan won both MVP and DPOY.

We had to trim the list somehow. Apologies to Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden. Each won MVPs. Each produced incredible statistical seasons. None of them deserved to crack this list of six.