NBA MVP Voting: Suns’ Devin Booker Finishes Above Mavs’ Luka Doncic

Adding insult to injury after being mocked by Devin Booker in a Game 5 loss on Tuesday night, Luka Doncic finished behind him in MVP voting.

Dalton Trigg | May 11, 2022

On Wednesday, the NBA announced that Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic won the MVP award for the second year in a row.

Jokic finished the regular season averaging 27.1 points, 13.8 rebounds and 7.9 assists per game while leading the injury-plagued Nuggets to a 48-34 record and the sixth seed in the Western Conference. He shot an outstanding 58.3 percent from the field.

gettyimages-1240589197-594x594 — Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images

gettyimages-1240589277-594x594 — Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images

Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic entered the season as the MVP favorite, but due to a slow start, he never had a real shot of winning the award despite having a fantastic run since the beginning of the calendar year. Doncic finished the season with averages of 28.4 points, 9.1 rebounds and 8.7 assists while shooting 45.7 percent from the field, including 35.3 percent from deep.

After the Mavs got blown out by the Phoenix Suns in Game 5 of their West semifinals series on Tuesday — a game where Devin Booker mocked Doncic after flopping in order to earn a flagrant foul call on Dorian Finney-Smith — the final MVP voting numbers added insult to injury. Here is how the top-5 panned out:

Nikola Jokic (Denver) - 875 points
Joel Embiid (Philadelphia) - 706 points
Giannis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee) - 595 points
Devin Booker (Phoenix) -216 points
Luka Doncic (Dallas) - 146 points

Booker averaged 26.8 points, 5.0 rebounds and 4.8 assists on 46.6 percent from the field, including 38.3 percent from deep, for the 64-win Suns.

gettyimages-1240589618-594x594 — Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images

gettyimages-1240589208-594x594 — Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images

gettyimages-1240548654-594x594 — Glenn James/NBAE via Getty Images

Although Booker is certainly worthy of MVP recognition, one could argue that Doncic is more valuable to the Mavs than Booker is to the Suns given the overall talent discrepancy between the two rosters. Dallas has some very talented role players that it has devolved well over the years, but Phoenix has higher-end talent across its roster, including future Hall-of-Fame point guard Chris Paul, Defensive Player of the Year candidate Mikal Bridges and former No. 1 overall pick DeAndre Ayton.

Regardless of who should’ve finished ahead of who, the league is in great hands moving forward with its young talent. Perhaps a rivalry between Doncic’s Mavs and Booker’s Suns will entertain us for years to come… and perhaps these MVP results will give Doncic a little more juice in Game 6 on Thursday as well.

Published May 11, 2022

DALTON TRIGG

Dalton Trigg is the Editor-In-Chief for Dallas Basketball, as well as the Executive Editor overseeing Inside The Rockets, Inside The Spurs, All Knicks, and The Magic Insider. He is the founder and host for the Mavs Step Back Podcast, which is a proud part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Trigg graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi’s College of Business and Economic Development with a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship in 2016. After spending a few years with multiple Dallas Mavericks-related blogs, including SB Nation’s Mavs Moneyball, Trigg joined DallasBasketball.com as a staff writer in 2018 and never looked back. At the start of 2022, he was promoted to the EIC title he holds now. Through the years, Trigg has conducted a handful of high-profile one-on-one interviews to add to his resume — in both writing and podcasting. Some of his biggest interviews have been with Mavs owner Mark Cuban, Mavs GM Nico Harrison, now-retired legend Dirk Nowitzki and many other current/former players and team staffers. Many of those interviews and other articles by Trigg have been aggregated by other well-known sports media websites, such as Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, Bleacher Report and others. You can find Trigg on all major social media channels, but his most prevalent platform is on Twitter. Whether it’s posting links to his DBcom work, live-tweeting Mavs games or merely giving his opinions on things going on with Dallas and the rest of the NBA, the daily content never stops rolling. For any inquiries, please email Dalton@MavsStepBack.com.