Who will be the next American to win NBA MVP? The candidates, the criteria and the Wemby factor

There's a chance we could soon have an NBA without any active American-born MVPs... so who's the best bet to change that?

Sam Quinn

May 19, 2026

1:43 pm ET

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8 min read

Imagn Images

By now, you've likely heard the often-repeated fact that the NBA has not had an American MVP since James Harden in 2018. Since then, Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) has won twice, Nikola Jokić (Serbia) has won three times, Joel Embiid (Cameroon) won once, and in the past two seasons, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada) has picked up back-to-back trophies. That streak alone doesn't quite do the American drought justice.

There are four active, American players who have won MVP awards: LeBron James has won four, Stephen Curry has won two and both Kevin Durant and James Harden have won one apiece. All four of those players are at least 36 years old. How much longer are any of them going to play?

James won his first MVP award in his age-24 season. Victor Wembanyama will be 23 next year. If he starts winning his trophies next year -- and, right at this moment, it seems like he will -- there is a feasible scenario in which those four American winners all retire before a new American MVP emerges. We might one day soon live in an NBA without a single active American-born MVP.

So all of this raises two interesting questions: how long will we have to wait for an American MVP, and who will that player be? Is he even in the NBA yet? Let's take a stab at answering those questions.

So... is Wembanyama going to sweep the next decade of MVPs?

This is a tempting narrative. History says it's enormously unlikely, even if he is among the most talented players in NBA history.

Remember, Michael Jordan only won five MVPs. James won four. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won six. Let's put those numbers in a bit more perspective. Jordan won his first MVP in 1988. Between 1988 and 1998, he played nine full seasons and won MVP in five of them. So even peak Michael Jordan, exclusively in the window in which he won his MVPs, only had a 55% or so chance of winning MVP in a given year. Perform this exercise with Abdul-Jabbar and you get a 60% hit rate. No player in NBA history has ever been a guaranteed MVP winner, even at his best.

There are a number of reasons for that. Voter fatigue is one of them, and its effects are relatively proven. Team circumstances, bad shooting variance, luck, all of these things can swing an MVP race even away from the NBA's best player. In Wembanyama's case, there's a more concrete barrier: the 65-game rule.

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Jack Maloney

Forget about how likely Wembanyama, specifically, is to play 65 games in a given season. How likely is any player to play 65 games? It depends on your definition, but the answer is less than you think. Of the 569 players to appear in a game in the 2024-25 season, only 169 played 65 games. Even if you filter out the 10-day players and the back-of-the-rotation non-factors, the numbers are still sparse. A total of 271 players last year started at least 10 games. If you're starting 10 games in a season, odds are, you're a legitimate NBA player. Within that group, around half, 140, got to 65 games. It's a toss-up for almost anybody. For someone at Wembanyama's size, the odds probably get worse.

Wembanyama has thus far been more durable than skeptics have expected, but it just isn't that hard to fall short of the 65-game threshold. When you put all of this together, Wembanyama's best-case MVP outcome during his prime is probably winning the trophy around half of the time, and since so few players even got there, it's probably likelier that he wins it a handful of times, but doesn't completely own it for the foreseeable future.

If not Wembanyama, what are we looking for in MVP winners?

The MVP award has grown somewhat formulaic in recent years. Since James won his third trophy in 2012, every winner has checked two boxes. The first is age: he is always between his age-24 and age-28 season. The second is prior stature. Every MVP in this window was either a First- or Second-Team All-NBA selection in the prior year. Essentially, you have to already be a top-10 player before you become an MVP, and the load-management era is so unkind to older players that the window in which players can win it is limited to their mid-20s.

Those are the biggest indicators, but they're not the only ones:

- MVPs need to score. Every winner in this window has averaged at least 25 points per game except for 2015 Stephen Curry, who only failed to do so because his team blew opponents out so frequently that he rested most fourth quarters.

- Winning is no longer an absolute, but it still holds quite a bit of sway. This century, we've had 18 MVPs from No. 1 seeds, five from No. 2 seeds, two from No. 3 seeds and two from No. 6 se