Winning the NBA MVP award, nicknamed the Michael Jordan Trophy since 2022, is the highest individual honor that can be bestowed on a basketball player.
Jordan himself has won it five times. His chief competitor in the all-time GOAT debate, who many, including us, believe has surpassed him in the race, LeBron James, has won it four times in his career. Bill Russell is tied with Jordan for the second-most MVPs in league history with five. And an underrated GOAT candidate, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, once the NBA's all-time leading scorer, won the award a record six times in his illustrious career.
Today, what we're going to discuss is the NBA players who have gotten the largest share of MVP votes in their careers. This list is about to be littered with some of the biggest names the sport of basketball has ever seen, so buckle up.
The runaway No. 1 winner of this honor, His Airness, Michael Jordan, owns the top spot here thanks to his otherworldly talent, as well as his relatively shorter career compared to other megastars.
If you take away Jordan's Washington Wizards years, his career was only 13 seasons long, and if you remove the year that included his late-season return in '95, it was 12. And if you remove Jordan's 18-game second season, which was cut vastly short due to injury, you realize Jordan's peak was more like 11 years. That, coupled with how dominant Jordan was as a player, makes it easy to see how he has such a huge lead in this exercise.
In Jordan's 11 full seasons pre-Wizards, he earned MVP votes, finishing Top 3 in the vote an astounding 10 times, and winning it outright five times. That number would be higher, too, if it weren't for voter fatigue, as our Global Rating metric determined that Jordan was the best player in the league, according to the stat, nine times during that stretch.
Making that even more impressive is the fact that Jordan was this dominant in an era that was still the Age of the Big Men in the NBA, in which centers dominated award voting. In the 29 seasons prior to Jordan's rookie campaign of 1984-85, a center had been named league MVP 23 times. What's more, only two backcourt players had won MVP prior to MJ, and they were both point guards, making his utter domination from the 2-guard spot not only awe-inspiring, but totally unheard of.
We don't see anyone passing Jordan ever in share of first-place MVP votes won, at least not anytime soon, not with how long modern careers last thanks to modern medicine.
As Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic gets up there in age, this number will likely go down, as will the big Serbian's place in this ranking. But for now, Jokic ranks second all-time in percentage of first-place MVP votes gotten during his career, an even more impressive feat considering he came off the bench for nearly 40 games over his first two seasons in the NBA.
By his fourth season, Jokic was on his way to establishing himself as an eventual first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, earning MVP votes every season since 2018-19, winning the award three times and finishing in second two other times.
People give LeBron James a ton of credit for his longevity, and rightfully so, but a player who deserves more love in that regard is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who ranks third all-time in percentage of first-place MVP votes received at 26.90 percent. That's a particularly wild number considering his career spanned two decades.
The first year Abdul-Jabbar got MVP votes was in 1969-70, his rookie season. The last season Abdul-Jabbar got MVP votes was 1985-86, his 17th season, when he finished fifth in the vote in his age-38 campaign. Another fun longevity stat about Abdul-Jabbar is the fact that he's the player with the most time between Finals MVP awards in league history. The UCLA legend's first time winning the award was in 1971 and his next time winning it was in 1985, his age-37 season.
Abdul-Jabbar owns the record for most MVP awards ever, though his peak happening during the 1970s, when the NBA was a bit down in talent, has to be taken into account there. Still, Abdul-Jabbar is one of only two players ever to win MVP back when players voted for the award (prior to 1979-80), and then to win the award again once the media took over the vote after that. Moses Malone is the only other player who can say the same.
Prior to 1979-80, players decided who would win league MVP every year, with the rule that they couldn't vote for themselves or teammates. And one player who benefited from that rule was the all-time rings leader, Bill Russell, who was clearly more respected by his contemporaries on the court than by the media who covered the league.
Russell is one of just two players in NBA history to win league MVP honors without making 1st Team All-NBA that same season, and he accomplished that three times, in '58, '61 and '62. In 1957-58, Hawks big man Bob Pettit earned 1st Team All-NBA, as voted on by the media, while Russell won MVP. And then in '61 and '62, Wilt Chamberlain was 1st Team All-NBA, while Russell was MVP. The only other player who can say the same is another legendary Celtic, Dave Cowens, who pulled off the same feat once, in 1972-73.
Who could say how many regular-season MVPs Russell would actually have if the media were voting for MVP back then, and not players with personal vendettas against other frontrunners for the award?
Either way, Russell earned MVP votes in 12 out of his 13 seasons in the NBA, and has one of the highest shares of first-place MVP votes earned in NBA history.
Another player who benefited from having a shorter career than most others on this list, Larry Bird won league MVP honors three times, and earned MVP votes in 12 out of his 13 seasons in the league, to go with his 22.72 percent of first-place MVP votes earned in his career.
It also helped that Bird arrived in the NBA as a ready-made product after spending three dominant seasons at Indiana State, before getting to the league for his age-23 campaign. Had Bird gotten to the NBA as a 19-year-old former one-and-doner, it's unlikely he'd have garnered as large a share of first-place MVP votes as he did.
Nevertheless, Bird was dominant out of the gate in the NBA, finishing fourth in the MVP vote as a rookie, while earning 1st Team All-NBA honors as a first-year player. Bird is one of just four players ever, along with Chamberlain, Wes Unseld and Tim Duncan, to make 1st Team All-NBA as rookies.