NBA Most Valuable Player
award
The NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) is an annual National Basketball Association (NBA) award given since the 1955–56 season to the best performing player of the regular season. Since the 2022–23 season, winners receive the Michael Jordan Trophy, named after the five-time MVP. A total of 36 players have won the award.
Prior to 2021, the winner received the Maurice Podoloff Trophy, which was named in honor of the first commissioner (then president) of the NBA, who served from 1946 until 1963. With the switch to the Michael Jordan Trophy, his name was moved to a new Maurice Podoloff Trophy given to the team with the best regular season record.
Until the 1979–80 season, the MVP was selected by a vote of NBA players. Since the 1980–81 season, the award is decided by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. Each member of the voting panel casts a vote for first to fifth place selections. Each first-place vote is worth 10 points; each second-place vote is worth seven; each third-place vote is worth five, fourth-place is worth three and fifth-place is worth one. Starting from 2010, one ballot was cast by fans through online voting. The player with the highest point total wins the award.
The public source identifies “NBA Most Valuable Player” as award. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Most, Valuable and Player.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q222047. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955, 2022, 2021 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “NBA Most Valuable Player” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.