With less than a month remaining in the 2025-26 NBA regular season, talk about this year's MVP race is rapidly becoming all the rage. Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas is the latest noteworthy name to chime in with his thoughts on the current climate, and OKC Thunder fans will be irate by what he divulged.
During a recent appearance on FanDuel TV's Run It Back, Thomas said there are "only two guys" who he believes should be in the running for the illustrious end-of-season honor: Victor Wembanyama and Jaylen Brown.
"To me, it's a two-man race. I know [Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's] done his thing, they're winning and everything, but sh*t they're loaded... When [Jayson] Tatum went down, we though for sure the Celtics would be in the lottery. And then Jaylen Brown' averaging 30. And if you take Wemby away from San Antonio, I mean, how good are they? They're good, but they're not championship-caliber good the way we're talking about them right now," Thomas said.
To Thomas, the main thought process for determining MVP is: "If we take this guy away, where would the team be?"
Considering Oklahoma City's one of the deepest teams the league has seen in quite some time, and has won a whopping 72.2 percent of their games without Gilgeous-Alexander in the fold over the last two seasons, the two-time champion is seemingly looking the other way when it comes to his choice for the honor.
Of course, one could easily counter this tired-out "slight" against SGA with a simple glance at the ridiculous impact and overall efficiency he's had on this, as Thomas said, "loaded" Thunder squad.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander unfathomably valuable for 'loaded' Thunder
Gilgeous-Alexander isn't just playing like the best player on the best team in the league this year -- he's actually putting forth one of the most efficient seasons the game has ever seen from a guy averaging north of 30.
Through 61 games played, the reigning MVP and Finals MVP finds himself dropping sensational averages of 31.5 points, 6.6 assists (career-high), 4.4 rebounds, and 1.4 steals while shooting 55.7 percent from the floor (career-high) and 39.3 percent from deep.
Boasting a 67.0 percent clip, if the season were to end today, he'd officially usurp Stephen Curry's 2015-16 mark of 69.9 for the highest true shooting percentage in a 30.0-plus point-per-game season -- fun fact, Curry became the league's first unanimous MVP that year.
On top of these absurd metrics, Shai is leading the league in clutch points (156), plus-minus (plus-11.7), and is ahead of both of Thomas' choices for the Michael Jordan Trophy in PER (31.49), while the Thunder place in the 97 percentile in point differential when he's on the floor (drop down to the 78 percentile).
So while people may want to use OKC's depth against him in the race for his second straight MVP, a quick Google search would easily put the kibosh on this anti-Shai rhetoric and, in turn, show just how unbelievably valuable he still has proven to be for the league-leading, 57-16 Thunder.