Luka Averaged 40 Points for Nine Games. Michael Wilbon Still Won't Give Him the Vote.

Michael Wilbon publicly threw shade at Dončić for MVP consideration this week — there's a media narrative angle here about whether Luka gets the respect his stats deserve.

— NBA Research Brief, March 26, 2026

Look, I understand why Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the frontrunner. The Thunder are having a historic season, SGA is a legitimate two-way monster, and he's been the engine of the best team in basketball for most of the year. That's a real MVP case. Victor Wembanyama is putting up numbers that make people question whether he's even human. The race at the top is legitimately competitive [2].

But here's the thing about MVP voting — it's supposed to reward the player who was Most Valuable to his team. Not the player with the best vibes. Not the player in the most marketable city. Not the guy who fits the narrative cleanest. When you average 40 points per game over nine games and your team goes 12-2, that's not just value — that's carrying. If the Lakers don't have Luka right now, they're nowhere near this seed. That argument has to count for something.

The 'Traded for a Championship, Not an MVP' Problem

Part of the Luka problem is narrative framing. The Lakers traded for him to win championships. That's the story everyone tells about LA. And because of that framing, when he dominates, voters rationalize it away — 'oh, LA has a good supporting cast,' or 'he was supposed to do this, it's not surprising.' That logic is backwards. SGA has a historically good Thunder team around him. Wemby has the Spurs built to support his greatness. The supporting cast argument cuts both ways or it cuts nobody.

There's also something a little uncomfortable about the way American media covers Luka. He came over from the Dallas Mavericks as the best player in the league who never won anything. He moved to LA with the explicit goal of winning a title. Some voters seem to resent his deliberate approach to building a winning situation, as if he should have suffered longer in Dallas. That's not a basketball argument. That's vibes. And MVP should not be a vibes award.

What Happens Now

Here's the practical reality: Luka probably won't win MVP this year. SGA has built too much of a lead in the narrative, and the Thunder are likely to finish with the best record in basketball. That's how these things usually go — the award follows the team record more than the individual numbers, even when the numbers scream otherwise [2]. But the fact that Luka's nine-game, 40-point-per-game stretch barely moved the needle in the MVP conversation is worth talking about.

Forty points per game. Nine games. Wilt Chamberlain's exclusive club. Lakers winning at a top-3 pace in the West. If any other player on any other team did exactly this right now, we'd be crowning him before the ballot was even printed. Luka deserves better than what he's getting from the voters — and more importantly, from the media supposedly evaluating them. The man is having one of the greatest individual scoring seasons in modern history. Act like it.