As expected, Houston Rockets superstar James Harden finished a distant third in the NBA’s MVP voting for the 2019-20 regular season. Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo won the award for a second consecutive year, while LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers came in second place.
The final results from the 100-person panel of global media members covering the league largely mirrored those of earlier straw polls.
Harden finished with 367 voting “points,” which easily outplaced fourth-place finisher Luka Doncic (200 votes) but was far short of LeBron James (753 points) for second place. In all, Harden had one second-place vote, 64 third-place votes, and 10 each for fourth place and fifth place. Out of the 100 voters, 15 did not have Harden among the top five.
Full MVP voting results … pic.twitter.com/uMmxqODTAN
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) September 18, 2020
For the season, Harden averaged 34.3 points, 7.5 assists, 6.6 rebounds, and 1.8 steals per game, and he joined Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson as the only players to ever lead the NBA in points and steals in the same season. He shot 44.4% from the field and 35.5% on 3-pointers.
With that scoring average, Harden became just the fourth player since the NBA/ABA merger in 1976 to win a scoring title in three straight years, joining Kevin Durant, Michael Jordan, and George Gervin.
Harden also won the scoring title in the 2018-19 season, when he led the NBA with a 36.1 points per game average, and in the 2017-18 season (30.4 points). Harden is now just the third player in league history to average more than 34 points per game in multiple seasons, joining a pair of Basketball Hall of Famers in Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain.
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Perhaps most notably, Harden’s historic numbers in the 2019-20 season again contributed to on-court success for his team. Now 31 years old, “The Beard” led the Rockets (44-28) to a top-four record in the Western Conference for a fourth straight season and the sixth time in seven years. With Harden as its star, Houston has now made the NBA playoffs in eight straight seasons, which is the league’s longest active streak.
Harden has earned Western Conference All-Star honors in all eight of his seasons with the Rockets, and he’s finished in the top three of the league’s MVP voting on five separate occasions during those eight years (2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020). He won the award in 2018.
Harden is the only NBA player to have finished in the top three of MVP voting in each of the last four seasons, and he’s also the lone player to make the All-NBA First Team in every year of that run.
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