Oh man. I just stumbled across maybe the worst quote ever delivered from an NBA team’s general manager about one of their players (Nikola Jokic) winning the league’s MVP Award. 

According to this quote and now more than few articles popping up on the internet, Nuggets GM told reporters that the “nasty turn” in dialogue around winning the NBA MVP took a toll on Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets team after the All-Star break. 

Denver Nuggets GM on Nikola Jokic and the NBA MVP Award

Okay so basically, Denver Nuggets GM is saying that Nikola Jokic finally faced some adversity for the first time in his entire professional basketball career and basically folded faster than a deck of cards. 

Got it. 

So now, the two-time reigning NBA Most Valuable Player has been exposed as someone who actually cares too much about what the media says and what’s happening on social media, that it completely disrupted his entire season to a point where his team went 12-11 in the second half of the year because he had to deal with a little bit of adversity about what people were saying about him and his chances to win MVP. 

Here’s the quote again: 

“We had to deal with some adversity with the whole MVP dialogue discourse nationally. In the middle of the season around the [All-Star] Break we hit a [little] bit of a lull [because] the MVP dialogue rolling around Joker and some it took a nasty turn.” 

Look, I have no idea if this is true or not but it does sound very similar to the narrative that was being pushed (on video) by Nuggets head coach Mike Malone a few months ago.

That’s basically what he told reporters, as if they just discovered that the conversation around the NBA MVP magically became toxic overnight while Jokic fell out of first place voting and was overtaken by none other than Joel Embiid. 

Honestly, the entire situation is HILARIOUS. 

As soon as a team or cities’ player is no longer the darling of the NBA, the excuse train comes rolling into town to pick everyone up and take them on a nice ride around the internet so they can drop overused text clips like “voter fatigue”, “MVP doesn’t matter”, “you should only care about NBA titles”, and lord knows whatever else they come up with. 

Embiid just spoke to Rachel Nichols on the debut of Headliners which will air tomorrow night on Showtime and had this to say about the MVP. 

“One thing I’ll say is that if people tell you they don’t care about it, they’re lying,” Embiid told Rachel Nichols recently. “That’s the best award you can get as a basketball player, it means a lot. But if I were to win it, it would validate all the work that I put in, that’s why I cared about it, because you put in so much work and if you get that recognition, it just validates that you didn’t waste your time.”

We can end with a simple question: Which player sounds like they are built to win an MVP Award? 

We all know the answer. 

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