With the NBA All-Star break now in the rearview and the stretch run upon us, things like award races are starting to come into the spotlight. And with that, Tim Bontemps of ESPN released this season’s second edition of his MVP straw poll, where he polls 100 potential voters from the media around the country.
The predictive poll has proven to be pretty accurate and offered a good look at how the MVP race has progressed in past years. On the most recent episode of the Hoop Collective, Bontemps broke down the results of the latest poll with Brian Windhorst and Tim McMahon and admitted that, although he never thought it could happen, Jaylen Brown is trending towards finishing in the top 5.
JB came in sixth in the latest poll, rising up from 9th place, where he was in Bontemps’ first straw poll of the season, which came out on December 19th. And although Brown is still on the outside of the top 5 looking in, he’s trending in the right direction, and several of the players ahead of him are in danger of missing the 65-game cutoff to be eligible.
Brown is winning a war of attrition
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander currently leads the poll, but he has missed eight games already and will be out for at least a few more with an abdominal injury. Nikola Jokic is second in the poll, but he has missed 16 games and can only afford to miss one more before being stricken from the ballots.
Victor Wembanyama was in fourth, but he can only miss four more games, and Luka Doncic was fifth but can only miss five. The MVP award is still to reward the best and most valuable player in the league each year, but in a way, it has also become a war of attrition, and that’s a war that Jaylen can win.
One of the things that has made him so great this season is his consistency, and a big part of that is playing in 50 of the Celtics’ 55 games. He’s kept up this crazy two-way play, leadership, and stability for almost two-thirds of the seasonon a team that’s the 2-seed in the East.Â
If he can take this to the finish line and play in roughly 75 games, he’s going to be in the top 5 for MVP, and he’s going to make first-team All-NBA. And he’ll be deserving. And he’ll have earned it.