As the calendar winds toward 2024, it's time to look back on the year in basketball with the help of my annual (and imaginary) Golden Basketball award.
Like the Ballon d'Or in soccer, the Golden Basketball rewards performance over the year across both regular season, playoffs and now the NBA's in-season tournament as well as international competition. Although all of these competitions have their own individual MVP awards, there's no comprehensive way to honor dominance across all of them.
The past 12 months have been emblematic of the way an NBA's evolving schedule creates a need to look across competitions. We had different MVPs for the regular season (Philadelphia 76ers' Joel Embiid), NBA Finals (Denver Nuggets' Nikola Jokic) and in-season tournament (Los Angeles Lakers' LeBron James). All three are finalists for this year's Golden Basketball, along with the best player in this summer's FIBA World Cup competition.
Notably not a finalist: 2022 winner Luka Doncic, who saw his Dallas Mavericks fall short of the play-in tournament a year after reaching the Western Conference finals. Doncic was the fourth different winner in as many years after James dominated the first half-decade I awarded the Golden Basketball, winning four times in the first five years.
Will Embiid or Jokic make it five in a row? Let's hand out this year's Golden Basketball.