The Most Loved NBA Finals MVPs

Source: Alamy Stock Photo

After Jaylen Brown became the most recent player to win the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP, we decided to identify which Finals MVPs are the most loved by fans online.

Boston Celtics’ star Jaylen Brown joined illustrious company as he won the coveted The Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player award. Brown joined a list of greats which includes all-time greats such as Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal. With these superstars always being the topic of sometimes heated debate and conversation, the team at NBA odds site Betway decided to identify which Finals MVPs are the most loved by fans online.

Using a social listening tool and looking at sentiment over the last 12 months, the data found that Brown comes in as the 12th most loved NBA Finals MVP with a positive online sentiment score of 15%. Brown narrowly finished behind last year’s winner in Denver Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic.

Golden State Warriors’ Rick Barry is the most loved Finals MVP with a positive sentiment score of 20%. Barry won the award in 1975 after leading the Golden State past the Washington Bullets, who featured future Hall of Famers Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld.

When looking at the other Warriors on our list, Stephen Curry was surprisingly only ranked 20th meanwhile his former teammates Andre Iguodala and Kevin Durant were inside the top 25. 

The full list of most loved NBA Finals MVPs can be seen below.

Los Angeles Lakers’ icon Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. was the third most popular Finals MVP and one of the many legendary Lakers to win the prestigious trophy. In the top 10 alone, there were three Lakers players as Johnson was joined by James Worthy and Kobe Bryant.

Meanwhile, Laker LeBron James, the only player to win the award with three different teams, was ranked 17th. Just under 13% of posts about “The King” were deemed positive.

It’s impossible to mention the NBA Finals without mentioning Michael Jordan. The record six-time Finals MVP winner with the Chicago Bulls had a positive online sentiment score of 14.31% which ranked him above James, who many consider his main competition for the title of GOAT.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the data was that Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo was named the least popular Finals MVP with just 7% of online posts about the “Greek Freak” in the last year being positive.

With the 2023-24 NBA season wrapped up, eyes will immediately turn to next year as fans try to predict which team will lift the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy in 2025. Usual suspects such as the Celtics and Nuggets remain the betting favorites which means we could see some players in our list become Finals MVP once again.  Or maybe it could be a year for the underdog, and we see a fresh name such as Anthony Edwards or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander win the honor for the first time.

Methodology

To determine the NBA Finals MVPs with the most positive online sentiment, we used social listening tool Brandwatch which crawls data on mentions across the internet from the past 12 months.

From then, we ranked the players based on who’s most positively talked about online.

Data is accurate as of 27/06/2024

*NBA greats Bill Walton and Jerry West were not included in the rankings as most online posts during the last 12 months were tributes after their passings.